Re: 2018-19 Canes Prospect and Cherkers Thread
No, you absolutely can't ignore college as a talent pool. Especially with American parents leaning more and more towards the US development programs and away from Canadian junior. That said, you can't get mesmerized by the college game either. It's not as fast or as physical as Canadian junior, and a lot of times teams and fans over-rate big college production players in terms of their NHL potential. Fox is a good enough example. If you dig a bit deeper on some of the scouting on him this season you start to see comments about how small and slow the ECAC is this season ... things that factor heavily in the ability of a small, speedy defenseman to rack up points like a pinball machine.
I'll go back to Vesey again, just because of recency bias, but he was supposed to be this fast, aggressive, super productive power forward who would step right in to an NHL roster and be good right out of the box. Yeah ... turns out he's fairly mobile as opposed to actually fast. He's kind of aggressive, but not physically noticeable most nights. He's got decent enough hands, but doesn't make plays with his passing at the NHL level which makes him fairly easy to negate. He's a good solid young player ... nothing more. I'm not saying you don't draft college guys. I am saying that you have to be careful to manage everyone's expectations about high end college prospects ... including the kid and his family. It's super tempting for the top college player to see that opportunity to play out his draft rights and then pick his own NHL team ... because of ego and any number of other factors. But it rarely turns out like they plan.
No, you absolutely can't ignore college as a talent pool. Especially with American parents leaning more and more towards the US development programs and away from Canadian junior. That said, you can't get mesmerized by the college game either. It's not as fast or as physical as Canadian junior, and a lot of times teams and fans over-rate big college production players in terms of their NHL potential. Fox is a good enough example. If you dig a bit deeper on some of the scouting on him this season you start to see comments about how small and slow the ECAC is this season ... things that factor heavily in the ability of a small, speedy defenseman to rack up points like a pinball machine.
I'll go back to Vesey again, just because of recency bias, but he was supposed to be this fast, aggressive, super productive power forward who would step right in to an NHL roster and be good right out of the box. Yeah ... turns out he's fairly mobile as opposed to actually fast. He's kind of aggressive, but not physically noticeable most nights. He's got decent enough hands, but doesn't make plays with his passing at the NHL level which makes him fairly easy to negate. He's a good solid young player ... nothing more. I'm not saying you don't draft college guys. I am saying that you have to be careful to manage everyone's expectations about high end college prospects ... including the kid and his family. It's super tempting for the top college player to see that opportunity to play out his draft rights and then pick his own NHL team ... because of ego and any number of other factors. But it rarely turns out like they plan.
