Topper wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 7:04 am
Recall the league wide hype on Scooter's first two - three seasons was no different than the current excitement on Celibrini. The kid won hardest shot at the all-star game for fuck sakes. League wide, he was considered the steal of the draft those first few years of his career.
That more people were wrong doesn't make them each less wrong.
Works that way for a fixed amount of contaminants, but not talent assessment.
If tomorrow you were offered Suzuki, or Necas, for Pettersson, would hesitate to make that trade ?
Heck, I'd take Vilardi, or even R.Thomas, straight across.
Topper wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 7:04 am
You have to look at decisions at the time they were made with the information that was available at the time.
In the general case, I would agree with you.
But that's just for assessing the decision-making process of the ordinarily competent. I use the advantage of hindsight to make up for the fact that I am not a drafting genius.
And we -- or at least, I -- do not have all the information that the scouting departments used, anyway. I'm just saying that a really simple measurement to which I did have access would predict susceptibility to injury. Yeah, the Sedins didn't arrive with impressive power-to-weight ratios. But if you tell me one relatively fit kid is 6'2", 185 (Sedins in their draft year), and another is 6'2", 165, I'm going to make a fairly confident prediction about which one is going to be injured more often playing a rough contact sport with a very relaxed approach to rules enforcement. There will be exceptions, but if you give me 10 such pairs, I will be right more often than I am wrong.
But to connect that to the point in which you are more interested, while I don't know what effect rushing their development might have had on their skill development, exposing young players to greater risk of mechanical injury is more likely to impair their physical development. And I can see where a series of relatively minor injuries that would not impeded their abilities as, say, landscapers, could take the edge off of the athletic performance of players who were used to, and relied upon, using their bodies at peak function. Naslund never really got his shot back after the elbow injury. That's very likely what happened to Juolevei, too. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have been a problem for the more robustly constructed Horvat, nor what ultimately limited Virtanen.
Players who accumulate some dings, or even just manage to keep competing long enough that their bodies experience normal age-related deterioration, have to re-tool their games to compensate. To the extent that EP40 has mental limitations, it might be with this process, but this season it looks to me like he really tried to embrace playing new way with his new skill set. It just looks like the grinder that is the NHL turned the Canucks' top-flight 1st line centre into a 2nd line entre.
And that was a predictable risk. Which circles back to my drafting hobby-horse, is the BPA the one with the highest ceiling, or the highest floor?
