Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
This is where scouts earn their money the most. It's easy for me to look as stats and figure out which players are the most talented at their level, but it is another to look at a player and try to figure out which ones have the most potential for growth or have skills that they think the player can transfer to the professional level more easily.
It seems that some scouts really feel that Crouse has the HIQ, motivation, and physical attributes to better translate his abilities to the NHL than some players that might have more favourable stats. As a simple fan, I consider myself reasonably knowledgeable, but I am pretty clueless about the finer nature of scouting. I have faith that people know what they are talking about.
There are players from junior that score at a PPG pace or higher, but never manage to take their game to the next level, but then there are modest 20 goal scorers that manage to bring that same level of production to the NHL. I know that is pointing out the obvious, but it is always impressive to me to see when a scout can identify the latter players.
|
I think this relates to the size debate that we rehash sometimes. Some posters seem to believe that big players dominate junior because of size and therefore their game may not translate to the NHL. I view it almost exactly the opposite of that. IMO big players who use their size well are more easily able to translate their game to the NHL because its not as easy to check them and physically dominate them. Big, physical players sometimes already play an NHL style of power game and thus their game translates to the NHL quite easily.
You see some posters say, "That guy scores 40 in junior but he's a man amongst boys and won't translate that to the NHL.
But what happens sometimes is you have a guy like Lucic who scored 9 goals in his draft year, 30 the year after that. What would those posters have thought his offensive upside in the NHL would be? Well it turns out he scored 30 goals in the NHL too.
Crouse already has scored almost 30 goals in junior and he hasn't played his 18 or 19 year old seasons yet. Crouse made the WJC team as a 17 year old and didn't look bad (MacKinnon wasn't particularly impressive as a 17 year old on Canada lets keep in mind as well.)
Interesting debate.