Wheeler also updated his top 100 prospects for this year. He has Rossi at 3 and a very complimentary write up about him.
Whooo boy, I can't wait until five years from now when I look at my Top 100 for 2020 compared to Wheeler. I completely respect and admire his writing and attention to detail and comprehensiveness, but boy do I disagree with him on pretty much everything.
I do agree with Wheeler on Rossi. I considered Rossi at #3, but as much as I wanted to move him up to that position I clearly have too much respect for the unbelievable upside of Tim Stutzle, who Wheeler ranked at #7, which is lower than I've seen him anywhere else.
Where I disagree with Wheeler the most is that two of my highest-priority categories he does not factor in at all -- defensive play for defensemen, and compete level for all skaters.
Example #1 would be that Wheeler has ranked the best defensive defenseman in the draft (Jake Sanderson) as low as I have seen him at #17. He spends his entire write-up of Sanderson not talking about Sanderson but rather rationalizing his own questionable ranking, before ending his write-up with the rationalization -- knowing that Sanderson is a likely top 7 overall pick -- "
If the first nine players on my board are gone, I wouldn’t scoff at taking Sanderson as high as 10th-overall in this draft." I laughed at that line, because it's totally cheating in a draft-ranking -- if you rank player so far lower than the consensus that you feel the need to rationalize it, you're essentially admitting uncertainty.
Example #2 is Braden Schneider, universally regarded as the best shut-down RD in the draft, universally drafted from the early teens to, at latest, the early 20s. Wheeler has him at #38 -- below several defensemen who would be considered among the sloppiest and least responsible players in their own zone in the entire draft: Poirier, Grans, Cormier, Wallinder. Wheeler's philosophy assumes that defensive-minded defensemen never improve their offensive game and offensive-minded will inevitably improve their defensive game. History has proven this untrue several times over.
Example #3 is simply
Greig vs. Nyqvist. Without getting too into it, most people who study the draft would argue that Greig has one of the highest compete levels among forwards in the entire 2020 class -- the kid doesn't quit on a puck and plays with almost dizzying heart, hustle and motor. Who has the lowest compete level in 2020? You could make an argument for Nyqvist, who would prefer to gift-wrap the puck to the opposition than to take a hit, who if he back-checked half as hard as he beaver-tapped whenever he wanted the puck might have actually been a passable two-way player. Wheeler has Nybeck as high as anyone at #29 overall and Greig at least 20 picks lower than anyone else in the business at #64.
Anyway, Scott Wheeler is great and we should all read him. But, like anyone else in this business (include myself) he has his own biases which need to be scrutinized with the same fairness that he scrutinizes certain players -- like Sanderson, Schneider and Greig.
. Thanks for that.
