By now many of you are likely aware that The Athletic’s prospect writer Corey Pronman has released his annual U23 NHL Player and Prospect Rankings. For those who do not have a subscription, the main point of contention for Rangers fans is that Gabe Perreault’s prospect ranking dropped 74 places from 52 to 126. Given his status as one of the top tier prospects, this seemed off, to be blunt.
Before I dive into this, I want to make it clear that I think these kinds of public rankings are meaningless and frankly, I have grown to care less and less about what Pronman thinks of players after their actual draft seasons. The point is, don’t put stock in them. That being said, The Athletic is a credible source for sports news and it would be naive of me to think that there is not a significant group of people wondering if Gabe Perreault’s prospect ranking deserves to be so much lower. Has he taken a step back?
No written explanation has been offered for why Perreault’s status as a prospect has decreased in Pronman’s eyes. Not even a generic blurb. Since last year’s ranking, Perreault has finished third in points per game NCAA scoring behind Will Smith and Macklin Celebrini, led USA to a second consecutive Gold medal tied for the team’s highest-scoring forward earning status as tournament All-Star, and currently sits 6th in points per game NCAA scoring following an off weekend at Merrimack. With all that in mind, it is reasonable to expect some explanation.
The only information we have so far that explains why Pronman decided to drop Gabe Perreault’s prospect ranking is his evaluation of Perreault’s skillset. Pronman still rates Perreault’s skating as below-average, a relatively defensible take, but I would push back against it as I think it has improved significantly over the past two years. His colleague, Scott Wheeler, agrees with my assessment there.
The more surprising revelation is that Pronman downgraded Perreault’s hockey sense from “High-end” to “Above average.” Evaluating “hockey sense” as a skill is a nebulous concept; I guess the general idea is that you know it when you see it. For that reason, it might simply be the easiest “skill” to bump down a notch when evaluating a player. I am just speculating, as we don’t have a written explanation for why Pronman feels college hockey’s second-leading scorer over the past two seasons has worse hockey sense than a year ago.
I have watched enough of Perreault over the last 2 seasons to trust my evaluation, which says that Pronman is full of it. Gabe Perreault’s prospect ranking here places him behind prospects such as Charlie Stramel, Fraser Minten, Easton Cowan, Carson Rehkopf, Vojtech Hradech, Harrison Brunicke, Danny Nelson, Anton Wahlberg, Trevor Connelly, David Edstrom, and our own Brennan Othmann (119) and Will Cuylle (61).
I don’t want to pick on those players individually, as many of those players are good prospects but they offer none of the dynamic upside Perreault does. A couple of them even I hadn’t heard of; you get a prize if you know who all of those players are. None of them have accomplished what Perreault has over the last year. And while Perreault has thrived, several have experienced difficult periods in their fledgling careers over the past year.
NTDP and BC linemates Will Smith and Ryan Leonard are ranked 36th and 39th respectively. My take on that line has always been that yes, Smith and Leonard have a more traditional top-line player toolkit, but when you watched them play together it was beyond clear that Perreault was an enormous part of what made that line tick. He wasn’t riding shotgun and scoring tap-ins, if anything he was the one giving Smith and Leonard tap-in goals due to his incredible skill and play-making ability. Ranking him 90 spots below those admittedly excellent players is frankly a farce.
Again, ultimately, Gabe Perreault’s prospect ranking in this piece doesn’t matter. Most rankings do not matter. Pronman will be right about some players, and wrong about many others as we all are. But as a consumer of hockey content with less and less time to do my own hobby scouting work, I think it is important to touch on the true issue with this piece.
Pretending like you have an informed opinion on draft-eligible prospects and drafted prospects and NHLers is a joke. What is the process here? He wrote that Lane Hutson, who has shown to be one of the best offensive defensemen in the league already, “could still be a top-four defenseman.” Hutson is playing 25+ minutes a night and leads rookies in scoring.
I do not know what went into Pronman’s decision to expand the scope of players considered in his rankings to include U23 players already in the NHL. But I can confidently say that the quality of his rankings has dropped significantly since he started including them. Before, I would take his rankings with a pinch of salt as I knew which kinds of players he liked and did not like. Now I wonder if he actually watches these players.
That leads me to my final takeaway from this piece, which is try to find people who specialize in certain leagues or teams and support their work (like Hope with the Wolf Pack!). They exist and offer much more valuable opinions than people who let on that they are catch-all scouts. Find your lane and stick to it. And don’t fret Rangers fans, all Perreault has done over the past two years is establish himself as one of the best wing prospects in the league.
Recent Comments