Sometimes I think people get caught up in the skills thing so much that they lose track of other aspects of team building. I'm perfectly fine picking up character sorts and grinders the deeper we go into a draft. To me it's a waste to go after a 5'6--5'7 skill guy like a Oksentyuk or a Pashin deep into the draft--a guy like Berard might not be very big either but he's a gritty will do what it takes guy who would have been great late 3rd round and on.
The reason why a Gropp couldn't make it was because he couldn't or wouldn't adapt his game. There's a lot to that mental part of I'm going to do whatever it takes. That seems to be missing from some of Will's analyses to me.
Anyway it wouldn't surprise me if we ended up with 4 or 5 NHL'ers out of this group because I think Cuylle and/or Berard will adapt to circumstances and that Vierling could break out and that Garand might be that fighter of a goalie who just never gives up.
It's funny, in the 90s and well into the 2000s so many focused on physical attributes --- size, grit, aggression, etc.
Then it swung the other way, as the game evolved, and a lot of people became solely focused on "skills" or how pretty someone makes something look.
The truth is that there's value in both, to a degree. But I think too many observers are a little too focused on the "show me" skills of prospects. I think that's why so many of them have a really hard time picking out defenseman in their reports.
If you look at the guys who do videos, it tends to be the forwards. Why? Because it's easy to take a clip and piece together a report about zone entries, and puck control, and skating, and offensive awareness.
But when you take a deeper look at a lot of these guys --- with some exceptions, you see far less content about reading plays, or getting into position to kill something before it has a chance to materialize, etc.
Guys like Schneider, or Robertson, and even Lundkvist in his draft year don't often get a ton of spotlight by online pundits because the camera isn't always on them and what they do can be very subtle if you're only watching the guy with the puck.
Sometimes that's also the difference between someone who see's the games, or has access to certain feeds or videos, compared to someone who is fast forwarding through a select handful of games and checking performances against a ranking system that someone else come up with.