Quote:
Originally Posted by RedHawk12
Similar thing with a guy like Jeremie Poirier. I'd probably get roasted 2 years ago calling him a C prospect and might still now. But then a prospect like Brzustewicz shows up - way better counting stats in junior and not as much of a defensive gong-show. Then if we draft a guy like Perekh - Elite numbers, solid outlet passing, defensively relatively sound. Then that's your A/A+, Brz is your B/B+ and Poirier is your C. Truth is, Poirier is still a bit of a mess in his own zone and would be a bit of a longshot to having a lengthy top-4 career.
|
So I had a long reply ready talking about production of defenders in junior and comparing Poirier and Morin's draft years... and then CP logged me out when I tried to post it. So here's the gist:
Lots of people were saying Morin was a better prospect than Poirier because he put up better numbers at the same age. I found the raw totals were slightly misleading because Morin was Moncton's only offensive threat on the back end, and Poirier had to compete for offensive deployments on a bad team that nevertheless had multiple other offensive defenders with whom to compete for deployments. Poirier scored an unusually high percentage of even strength and primary points, doing so at rates higher than a lot of forwards (his "offensive involvement", as I put it, was actually more impressive than Connor Zary's from his draft year, as an example).
I went on to suppose that Brzustewicz was likely more similar to Morin in this way than Poirier, though I noticed that he only had 24 PP points this past season. I also clarified that scoring a lot of powerplay and secondary points isn't a red flag against defenders, I just wanted to illustrate how unusual Poirier was as a prospect.