depends on which game you watch – levshunov's issue is that he's super inconsistent but when he's on he's insane. like, best defensive draft prospect since dahlin level insane.
If you have a game video in mind please share it. I have seen about five of his games during the year and then I watched his whole NCAA tournament run.
So far I've found that even some of the games his supporters love, I'm still nervous about the player.
Here's an example that just popped up on my youtube today, from elite prospects top 10 - it has a Levshunov clip I've seen people share a few times. In it I see three bad puck plays where he's just asking opponents to take the puck away. The first is the obvious suicide pass turnover, the next in the middle of the ice, and then the last a few seconds later just inside the zone where this play usually results in a 2 on 1 against.
It is hard to reconcile how bad he looks to me with how good he obviously is - this is clearly the best player on a very good NCAA team.
So is this a case of a player who will be even better (insanely good?) when he learns to make better decisions about positioning and with puck play? Or is it someone who will be much much more limited in the NHL?
There are D in the NHL that would be #1s if they made better decisions. Jack Johnson was one of them. We have a few on our roster now. The league is full of them. There are guys drafted #3 like Jack Johnson and Gudbranson who are powerful and elite skaters. In Johnson's case he was a dominant NCAA player too who scored a lot. But his erratic puck placement and erratic positioning never went away so he wasn't able to take that next step from there.
a player being "too similar" to mateychuk (or werenski, as i've seen people claim with buium) should be a green flag, not a red one. those guys are prototypical modern defensemen who control play in all three zones, take the puck away, and keep the puck. there's no reason why they can't have a bunch of those guys on defense.
It's a green flag for me as well with Buium.
i think he has so many translatable elements of his game. he's not just a guy who goes out there and dangles, he creates a ton of nhl-style offense. he's also a lot better defensively than folks realize – he defends with anticipation, mobility and an active stick.
imo it's more likely he becomes a jared spurgeon type defender (small but effective) in the NHL – but with significantly more offensive upside – rather than a deangelo/gostisbehere type who doesn't play defense.
but he'll be frustrating to watch for the same reasons why werenski is sometimes – his body language is really casual. which gives off a false perception of a low effort level.
Parekh's offense looks very translatable to me. When I say offensive specialist I'm thinking high end - like maybe 60-80 pts. And his defense has been much improved in the playoffs.
But I do think his D game is closer to Gostisbehere than Spurgeon, who was a star defender in his prime. Spurgeon was always a dog on a bone, like a stronger and more refined Blankenburg. He knew how to defend from the beginning. It definitely isn't natural to Parekh. He's trying now and when opponents aren't too big and strong he's okay at it, and that sounds like Gostisbehere to me, who does try.
There's a big possibility Parekh ends up a bit like Adam Boqvist - better offensively than Boqvist but still very limited by his physique. He looks like a player who will be injured a lot. He already struggles when opponents get physical in junior. He has no hope of stopping the cycle with how weak he is on his skates.
The joke about Parekh on the Hawks board is "Parekh is for folks who missed out on the Boqvist ride the first time around".
I've been checking weekly to see if that thing had come out yet, and it turns out that this week I'd checked about two hours before they posted it. Sigh.
