[sureLoss]

McKenzie's top 16 preseason rankings. Celebrini first followed by Eiserman and Demidov

https://www.tsn.ca/draftcentre/mackl...king-1.2007499


Some interesting tidbits from the article:

If the scouts are excited by the trio of potential first-line NHL forward talent available this year, they are also enthused by the sheer quantity, and relative quality, of defencemen on TSN’s Pre-Season Top 16.

The No. 4 and No. 5 spots on the list are held down by blueliners — respectively, Michigan State freshman Artyom Levshunov, a 6-foot-2, 199-pound Belarusian who put up some nice offensive numbers in the USHL last season; and London Knights 6-foot-2 3/4, 204-pound Sam Dickinson, a strong-skating two-way presence from the Greater Toronto Area. Levshunov is a right shot; Dickinson is a left shot.

While Celebrini, Eiserman and Demidov are, for now anyway and it is subject to change, projected to have first-line NHL potential, Levshunov and Dickinson are viewed more as potential No. 2s and/or No. 3s on the blueline as opposed to being No. 1s.

But there was such a dearth of defence prospects in last year’s draft that having two in the pre-season top five this year, plus five in the top 10 and eight in the top 16, is quite welcome.

“Lots of interesting D,” one scout said. “Maybe no [Victor] Hedmans or [Cale] Makars, but lots of good ones, quite a few right-shot D, too, which is nice.”

Perhaps the most flat-out intriguing prospect on TSN’s pre-season list is 6-foot-6, 203-pound Russian left-shot defenceman Anton Silayev. When TSN made its initial inquiries of the scouts on the Class of 2024, Silayev was nowhere to be found. But once the KHL started playing games in the last couple of weeks, scouts were scrambling to get a handle on the Russian behemoth who seemingly came out of nowhere to create seismic shock waves in the scouting community.

The scouting opinions on Silayev are all over the place. What we do know is that in his first four KHL outings he played close to 20 minutes per game and picked up four assists. Russian scouts immediately alerted their NHL teams to this larger-than-life surprise. Some teams have already done deep (video) dives on his KHL games — as well as looking back on what seem to be pretty non-descript scouting reports from last year — while others are just now coming to the Silayev party.

But there’s an incredible buzz about Silayev because, in an admittedly minute sample size, he does look like a prospect with all the tools to be a No. 1 NHL defenceman. But where on the pre-season list do you slot him, when some of the scouts we surveyed still haven’t watched him play and aren’t quite sure yet what to make of him?

Well, one scout said Silayev could eclipse Levshunov and Dickinson as the top D prospects in the draft, and he should be immediately pegged as a Top 5 pick. Some others said it’s way premature to even put him in the pre-season Top 10. But there were enough of our 10 scouts who believe he has tools that will allow him to challenge the Big D Three of Levshunov, Dickinson and Jiricek and, given his size, could already be eclipsing a gaggle of smaller, more one-dimensional offensive defencemen.