That’s on Erik and the SJ media department. I get it if Erik doesn’t want to talk about the Ottawa situation; he’d rather do it all at once tomorrow afternoon. But the SJ media guys should be giving the media a heads up that not to bring it up.
But the play isn’t to get him necessarily. Toronto will match. The key is getting him to UFA at 27. Because Toronto will want to sign him for 8 years. Plus the max money will put a hurt on the Leaves.
Sens played well defensively tonight. I get the NYR aren’t a great team but maybe just maybe the light is slowly coming on? Spoke with a contact who is very pro Sens. Told him I heard Stone/Duchene won’t stay here unless a new owner is in place. Contact said BS, he heard Duchene was close to signing. Couple days later NHL spokesman Bob Mckenzie chimed in saying Duchene was close to signing. Dorion leaking shit again.
I wish OEL would get out of Arizona, he deserves better. Hopefully he doesn't wait too long like Karlsson
Pronman's annual "prospects I was wrong about." Spoiler It is time for my annual look at select prospect evaluations I made that were wrong, examining the information available at the time to highlight what specific issues caused the missed projection and what I’ve learned from those mistakes. This is a business where mistakes will happen often. The players I’ve highlighted are not because they were the only errors but because there was something interesting that I’ve learned from the evaluation. One theme you will see in this year’s edition is a discussion about player statistics and how they can both help and hurt. Too Low Elias Pettersson, C, Vancouver Pettersson is making his second appearance in this column. At his draft in 2017, I liked him but wasn’t in love with him and rated him in the teens. After a great start to the Swedish Hockey League season, I projected him as a top 10 prospect at the midpoint of last season. Going into this season, I rated him as a future star and the No. 9 prospect in hockey. To explain those ratings, let’s go through my evaluations of Pettersson throughout the years. The first time I saw Pettersson was spring 2016. He was a middle-six forward on Sweden’s U18 team in North Dakota. He had a good, albeit unspectacular tournament. He made some nice plays and passes but nothing special. He was 13th on that team in shots and didn’t look like a dangerous goal scorer at all (a thought I realize looks hilarious in hindsight). However, he performed well in the Allsvenskan as an underage and had some skill, so I had him as a mid-round guy. The 2016-17 season starts and he lights it up with Timra. I’m sent clips of him making highlight reel plays. I’m intrigued, but I make my first major mistake: not watching enough Timra (I later double back and realize I erred by not doing so). Pettersson was invited to the 4 Nations in November by the Sweden U20 team. He played up in the lineup and looked good. I saw high-end skill and good skating, but didn’t see special playmaking or a special shot. I have Pettersson as a first-round pick now. Then the 2017 World Junior Championships roll around, and Pettersson was very mediocre. I saw flashes of skill and vision, but he lost a lot of battles and his speed becomes a flag now. I keep hearing about how good he looked in the Allsvenskan, but I egregiously don’t pay too much attention to that. At this point, I’ve seen him live about 7-8 times and another 5-6 times on video and have yet to see him have a great game. His numbers intrigue me a lot, but I don’t get him into my top 10. While there are reports that teams have Pettersson ranked first, what’s more interesting is the divide that emerged, from talking to numerous teams, between the scouts who saw Pettersson mostly in international play (like me) or those who saw him with his club team. The former group didn’t like him that much, the latter were salivating at the thought of picking him. It’s why some teams had him rated very high (1-3) and others had him outside their top 10. At the 2017 world juniors camp prior to his injury, I didn’t see anything that impressive. He returned to the SHL and lit the league on fire again. Clips of him sniping from long distance and making highly skilled plays are sent to me and I circled back to watch a few SHL games. I liked what I saw but I wasn’t blown away. A potential sample bias issue. At the 2018 world juniors, Pettersson was given a major role and showed he can be lethal on the power play. However, his line was mediocre at even strength. I saw the great shot and he ran the power play very well, but his pace concerned me. Coming out of that tournament, I’d say about half of the scouts I talked to had 2-3 players from the 2017 draft rated ahead of Pettersson. Usually some combination of Casey Mittelstadt, Martin Necas and Robert Thomas. At this point, I’d seen him play live around 15-17 times and another 10-12 times on video in a two-year span, and had yet to see one game where he blew me away. I rate him as a top 10 prospect due to the great skill/vision/shot and his stats, but I didn’t think he was a gamechanger. He continues to light up the SHL and their playoffs, I occasionally swing back there but feel like I already know the player well enough. Vancouver fans, in my mind, are getting too excited about him given his flaws. He makes the Swedish national team and I’m very intrigued in the limited time he plays at that level before he gets injured again. We know what happens next. Pettersson has crushed the NHL this season. He won’t shoot 30 percent forever, but he’s a very good player with a ton of ability, an elite shot and better feet than I thought. I still like Mittelstadt, Thomas, Henrik Borgstrom, Quinn Hughes and Filip Zadina a ton, but I’d take Pettersson ahead of them at this juncture. I don’t think my No. 9 rating was that far off. I projected him as a star, which it looks like he is, just a few spots too low; but my ratings of him prior to that were more off. One major lesson I’ve taken from this is to value club level hockey. One NHL executive stressed to me that international play can never be the full picture. That is a lesson I’ve kept in mind. For example, while Kaapo Kakko looks just fine this season for Finland’s U20 team, in some TPS games he’s looked like a first-overall pick. I zeroed in on Jesperi Kotkaniemi in his club play last season, which was a reason I felt he was a top-five pick. I’m trying my best to watch every KHL, SHL and Liiga team multiple times this season. Another lesson is the value of numbers. I’ve always been a numbers-heavy guy, and I don’t believe you should ever rank a guy based on stats, but Pettersson’s production was off the charts and an indicator that I was off despite my concerns about his skill set and performance. Barrett Hayton, C, Arizona Hayton was a fascinating prospect to follow his draft year. I wasn’t blown away by him initially. He looked like a smart two-way center without a ton of upside. I saw more offense the more I watched him. I thought he was very skilled but didn’t think it was top 5-10 pick skill. I also had concerns about his skating. And while the Soo were a deep team, his counting numbers were a mild concern too (although he got top power play time). I rated him as a low first/high second due to my concerns. Since then it’s clear I got the evaluation wrong. Hayton has blown me away in nearly every viewing this season. His skill level is high-end, he’s a wonderful playmaker and he’s added a ton of pace to his game. He shows he can gain the zone with speed and make a play: As well as showing the kind of skill of top-level players: I don’t have him as a top-five pick now as Arizona did, but I’d have him in my 6-10 range among 2018 prospects. Arizona did its homework and saw a player with all the tools, even if he didn’t have jaw-dropping numbers and was buried in a deep lineup. I watched a ton of Hayton and saw that player in flashes, but I should have watched him even more and focused in more. He’s a center with decent size who is great at both ends with game-breaking skill and more than enough pace for the NHL. That’s a heck of a prospect. Alex DeBrincat, RW, Chicago This is a trickier one because I always liked DeBrincat a lot. I projected him as a top-six forward in his draft year; I just didn’t think he would be THIS good. He’s emerged as a top-line winger and one of the more dangerous goal scorers in the NHL. One NHL executive who also underrated DeBrincat said the lesson is “don’t underrate goals.” DeBrincat scored 197 goals in 246 OHL games. It’s a funny quote, but one that has a deeper meaning. When you are scouting players, you are drawn to the clearly obvious plays. The speed down the lane, the skilled play through a defenders legs, the bullet pass that cuts through the seam that gets tapped in on the back door. It’s easy to love the play drivers, the playmakers, the zone entry artists; they are easy to spot and their impact is easy to scout. Goal scorers can be tougher, and DeBrincat was a unique prospect. He was tiny, with the most generous measurement around 5-foot-7. He was also a very average skater and slow for his size. That was a red flag. His elite shot was obvious, and scouts who watched him in the OHL saw things to support a high pick, like his fantastic hockey sense and compete level, on top of being skilled with the puck. Even in games where he faded into the background he tended to score. Yet his detractors pointed to teammates Connor McDavid and Dylan Strome as reasons for DeBrincat’s scoring. And there were times I was skeptical of his talent level, including whether his speed was elite enough to be an impact player. But he scored a lot then. He scores a lot now. Don’t underrate goals. That concept is going to come up a lot in the lead up to the 2019 draft with players like Cole Caufield and Arthur Kaliyev. Brady Tkachuk, LW, Ottawa Brady Tkachuk (Richard A. Whittaker/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) In the past two weeks, I started to get texts about Tkachuk and whether I’ve come around on him. The answer is yes. By the time the draft rolled around, I liked Brady a lot. I pegged him as a first-line forward. After the World Junior camp in the summer, I bumped him up to a good first-line forward but not a star. He’s looked like a star early on this NHL season and, at the very least, I underrated how much of a sure thing he was to be a very good player. I was skeptical midseason, though, and it’s where I got a reputation as a Brady Tkachuk hater. He didn’t kill it at Boston University. There were games where he was fine but not amazing. He was a top player on the USNTDP the season prior, but it wasn’t a deep offensive team and his numbers weren’t that great. Compared to Oliver Wahlstrom at the same age, the two players weren’t close production-wise. I liked certain things about Tkachuk. His physicality and compete were amazing. I liked his hockey sense a lot but didn’t think it was elite. I saw skill and speed but didn’t think it was amazing. The hockey sense part was my major error. His hockey IQ isn’t just very good, it’s elite. He and his brother, Matthew Tkachuk, have incredible instincts and see the game at the highest level. Debating this aspect of Brady Tkachuk’s game with an NHL scout who believed Tkachuk’s IQ was special, I argued, “how can you say a guy has elite IQ/vision if he never runs a power play off the half-wall and is never a primary playmaker on a line?”The scout replied, “why does that have to be true for him to have an elite brain?” He was right. I was viewing the world too narrowly. I let Tkachuk’s statistics and a simplistic view of what a top prospect should look like alter my view of what was a top player (also by the end of the season, Tkachuk was running BU’s power play off the half-wall). I’m adjusting the way I view the sport due to this mentality. The way I view 2019 prospect Matt Boldy is an example. He’s not a traditional playmaker. He doesn’t run power plays or drive play as a center, but he creates down low as well as anyone, with elite vision and instincts and makes special plays. I didn’t give Brady his due. He drives play exceptionally well, makes plays at an elite level and looks like a potential star for the Senators. John Gibson, G, Anaheim As my readers who were familiar with the Carter Hart drama of the summer know, I have a conservative approach to valuing goalies, especially young goalies. And not just your favorite team’s top goalie prospect, I’ve been doing this for every team for a long time. One player who comes to mind is John Gibson. When he was a prospect, I liked him a lot. But I liked him a lot relative to the very conservative scale I use. I rated him a low first/high second, even after his MVP performance at the World Junior Championships where many NHL scouts would have pegged him as a top 10 if not a top-five pick. I hedged against that for the typical reasons. Goalie projections are fraught with risks, more so historically than skaters, and goalie performance is highly variable in the NHL. I also rated Gibson a tier lower than Andrei Vasilevskiy who I felt was more the real deal. Gibson has been not only very good in the NHL, but consistently very good, and looks like a potential Vezina candidate. I still believe in my philosophy, but there are times it will undershoot when a goalie does become a star. I did not project Gibson to be a star, or close to it, and he has become one, so I have to own that. Oskari Laaksonen, D, Buffalo The main point of this column is to highlight errors I’ve made and how I’ve learned from them. In the case of Laaksonen, I don’t think I made a glaring error. At the time of his pick, I had never heard of the guy. He was never at an international event but there was no way with my current process I would have ever watched him play live or on tape and deemed him not a prospect. Yet Buffalo picked him in the third round in 2017, surprising some in the industry. Two years later it looks like a very shrewd pick. Laaksonen regularly leads his Liiga team in minutes, he skates very well, he’s skilled and he has good offensive instincts. He’s gone through a growth spurt lately and has come out of it looking like a real prospect. I don’t think I made an error in judgment here, but I didn’t even know about a now 19-year-old player who was drafted at 17 and seems on track to become an NHL player in the next few years. That’s a mistake regardless of the reason. It’s also one of the gutsiest and best picks I’ve seen in the past few years with the caveat that Laaksonen still needs to prove it at the NHL level. Dennis Cholowski, D, Detroit I’ve been mildly skeptical of Cholowski as an NHL defenseman. I’ve never called him a bad prospect, but I figured he was a 2-3 year AHL guy who had a chance to play but wasn’t a lock. Since then he broke camp with the Wings and got off to a great start. He’s tailed off a bit since, but I should have projected him as a likely NHL defenseman. I underrated his offensive touch and overall upside. I don’t know if he’s going to be a top-four guy on a good team, but he’s in that conversation right now. I watched him a fair amount at St. Cloud in 2016-17 and in his draft season, and thought he was good but nothing special. I watched a little bit of Portland last season but also thought he was good, not amazing. He was cut from Canada’s U20 team, and I felt I had a good feel on him by then as a just fine prospect. At some point last season, I started getting reports from sources that he was looking very good in the WHL. I somewhat dismissed that, which was clearly an error. I was biased by previous viewings of him in the two years prior and didn’t go that extra mile to be 100 percent on my evaluation. Fighting biases is one of the toughest parts of this business, to realize everything you thought might be off and to give players an extra chance to impress you. Timo Meier, LW, San Jose Meier took a significant step forward this season, becoming one of San Jose’s top players on one of the best possession teams in hockey. He is generating shots at a near elite level and is one of the better power wingers in the league. I liked Meier as a prospect, but I wasn’t enamored with him. I didn’t have him as a top-10 pick. On the qualitative side, Meier struck me as a very quick winger with good touch but his skills/IQ didn’t strike me as high end. On the quantitative side, despite having fantastic, goals, points and shots numbers, I was hedging a lot against prospects with late birthdates. Around that time I was heavily biased by my studies that showed older players were overvalued at the draft, even though a top talent was staring me in the face. Meier had a very so-so lead up to his draft season and that biased me. As well I slightly underrated his hockey sense and compete level. Since undervaluing so many late birthday prospects between the periods of 2014-16, I’ve shifted my philosophy to scouting first, numbers second when it comes to evaluations. I still think numbers and research are very important, but I need to be sure of the tools and not get away from that part of the analysis before I get into anything else. Too High Michael Dal Colle, LW, New York Islanders Michael Dal Colle (Eric Hartline/USA TODAY Sports) Dal Colle’s draft was nearly five years ago, and I rated him eighth overall. My top 10 in order were Aaron Ekblad, Sam Bennett, William Nylander, Sam Reinhart, Nikolaj Ehlers, Kevin Fiala, Leon Draisaitl, Dal Colle, Kasperi Kapanen and Haydn Fleury. Despite ranking Dal Colle that high, I wasn’t passionate about him, like I was with Nylander, Ehlers and Fiala. Sure, I saw good skills, good hockey sense, a good shot and a big winger. But I didn’t love his feet, pace or compete level. Sources said his skill and sense were high end, and I saw it in flashes, but never consistently. I remember having concerns about his skating and some NHL scouts dismissed my concerns, saying his skating was fine. As a young evaluator at the time, I let that bias me even though I should have trusted my gut. He never blew me away in a game, yet he had amazing production, he was a big winger with tools, and a lot of people I trusted said he was full of talent and rated him very highly. I’m not perfect by any means. Exhibit A: this article. But every now and then I think I can nail a call contrary to the scouting consensus. Our customers pay for my opinion, and I need to trust my judgment because I’ve worked very hard for a long time to project some sort of expertise in this area. I didn’t believe in Dal Colle, and I ranked him top 10. Call it groupthink or negligence, that’s a clear breach of what I should have done. That’s what Dal Colle taught me and it’s a lesson I’ve carried with me for years. Jesse Puljujarvi, RW, Edmonton Puljujarvi is by no means a bust. I think he will be a good player for the Oilers, but he will unlikely live up to his fourth-overall-pick billing. I chalk up this error to being biased by pedigree and numbers when my notes didn’t line up. The pedigree on Puljujarvi was fantastic. He’s been well-known in the prospect world for many years, destroyed good pro leagues at the age of 16, was on Finland’s U20 team at 16 and was MVP of the world juniors at 17. That’s the resume of a future NHL star. In my notebook leading into his draft, I noted how much I loved his speed, especially for a guy his size, and thought he could score goals. I also thought he had skill and good vision, but I never marked down instances where I thought either were special attributes. This is where the bias part plays in. Your brain can fool you. Surely if he scored as much as he did at certain levels and tournaments his skills and hockey sense must be high end. But that’s why you scout players. In fact, Puljujarvi’s sense has been an issue in the NHL, and I may have slightly overrated it. This is another lesson in why you can’t scout stat lines. Dylan Strome, C, Arizona I want to thank Arizona and Chicago for helping me get a head start on this profile late Sunday night. I’ve heard interesting theories from people who liked Strome a ton for why he hasn’t become an impact guy. “He’s a victim of the new NHL and it’s importance on speed,” is a popular one. I don’t think the NHL just got quicker. Speed has always been important. Maybe the degrees have changed a bit but skating has always been a top priority for NHL players. For me, the answer is a bit simpler. Strome has certain components about his game that are great. He also scored a ton and played a premium position. He looked the part of a prospect who would be an impact player in terms of style, size and production. These factors clouded the obvious issues in his game between his skating, pace and, at times, compete level. For the record, I still think he will become a good NHL player; maybe not a star, but between his high-end skill and hockey sense, I can’t see him not being a useful player. This is why I think it is important to be systematic in how you evaluate hockey players. Grade every tool rigorously, even if the industry consensus believes a player is a no doubt stud. Grade skating, skill, IQ, shot, compete, etc. with the same rigor for the third-overall pick that everyone loves as you do for a third-round sleeper. If I had done that, I might have hedged against Strome. I got lazy. I let consensus influence me and didn’t zero in on the skating like I should have when I rated him fourth overall behind Mitch Marner. I know some scouts who did what I should have, and they correctly had Strome a lot lower than he went.
This mascot is the best move by the flyers in a long while. The guy under that costume should receive Haskins paycheck at least once a month
completely unnecessary hit/clear 2 minute interference but nowhere near suspension worthy, dude grabbing his head was ridiculous
I did not see it, I just wanted to get a shot with you. I said it before, Wilson looked very good against mtl a few weeks ago. He might be the new Marchand. He can play
This makes it looks slightly better. It's still way late, from behind. He knows he has zero margin for error. If he gets games for that, be mad at him. Not the league
The hit itself was dumb but not overly vicious. The problem is it was completely unnecessary. Wilson just can’t help himself.
The league where dude slew foots Oshie and slams him to the ground to cause him to miss 20 games and gets nothing and I shouldn't be mad if Wilson gets games for that, fuck off.
Already said it was unnecessary, it's not even a conversation if dude does embellish the fuck out of the hit.
No but it’s a joke to say a guy embellished a hit he didn’t see coming from a guy that much bigger than him.
he grabbed his head, never knew a shoulder to shoulder hit could cause a head injury no matter the size
The guy was skating backwards in the middle of the offensive zone and looking at the puck like his life depended on it.
One game and another notch on wilson’s Belt. The thing here Is that he is hurting himself. This was not that vicious but really stupid. Wash will need him with how much they pay him, and he is a good player
My take from watching it on mobile. Completely unnecessary, late, from behind, arm was tucked but his elbow was still out. Whether it hit his neck or his head isn’t that important to me because he intentionally hit him near the head area with plenty of time and space to avoid it. Throw the book at him because he hasn’t learned his lesson. Dumbass, and unfortunate, because he’s a talented player.
Say what you want but your near the head area is absolute bullshit. Completely unnecessary hit, anyone who says it was near the head has an agenda.
It was a bad hit from behind that was easily avoided. Idk why youre so focused on the head. It's not like there's a rule that says you can only be suspended for head contact.