Quote:
Originally Posted by Enoch Root
You seem to come to that conclusion based on the fact that he is 6 months younger.
However, if you look at both of their progression over that last several years, Horvat has not been closing the gap at all. So what reason is there to think that he will in the future?
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By my reading—and based precisely on the fact that Horvat has an April birthday and Monahan and October birthday—I would actually say that yes, Horvat has already shown that he could close the gap. He played his last season in the OHL last year as an eighteen-year old, and scored at very nearly the same rate as Monahan when he played his last OHL season, also as an eighteen-year-old.
The argument here is that Horvat will quite likely experience some added growth/improvment to his game once Monahan has hit his developmental peak, based on the fact that he is several months behind developmentally. Of course, this it will also not come as a surprise if this does not happen.
What does this mean? Not much, in the grand scheme of things. I project Monahan to be a first-line centre—he's pretty much almost there already. I project Horvat to likely top out as a second-line centre, and to meet that lofty goal he still has some room to get there. So then, yes, I do expect him to close the gap—by which I mean that at their developmental peaks, Monahan will look not quite as much better than Horvat as he does now. That's all.