Quote:
Originally Posted by Jiri Hrdina
Worth hearing how he ranks players:
"My preference is for highly skilled players with upside. I look for prospects with speed, skill and intelligence. Skating is a little more important to me in forwards than defenders, and physicality is more important to me in defenders than forwards. I prefer forwards to defensemen, and centers to wingers. My ranking philosophy is the No. 1 goal of drafting and development is to find stars, and even a minor chance of becoming a star has significant value."
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See, he says this, and in some cases based on the rankings it appears true (Hughes at 7th despite his slight frame seems pretty high, and I think Hughes is likely to be very good). But then you look at other players' rankings, and scratch your head. A quick search indicates that just in this ranking, words like "size", "weight" and "bulk" are used about 40 times. His rankings also seem to favour more recently drafted players. Obviously basically all of these rankings are heavily based on in-person viewing, which both advantages players in North America and creates serious potential for errors based on "seen him good" in a particular sample of games.
I dunno, I think Pronman has some biases that make these rankings pretty hard to put a ton of stock in. Of course, that's true of literally anyone's published rankings, and his have more "meat" to the explanations for them than most others'. I just think there are a number of places where you can only go so far outside the consensus and the statistical evidence in your thinking about a prospect before your view no longer appears reasonable. He seems to do that about 15% of the time. I guess that does generate buzz and discussion, and at the end of the day, that's what his job is.