BPA is always a point of contention with me because IMO it can be in the eye of the beholder. Yes, every draft there are clearly players who are so much better than everyone else, this yr it's Lafreniere. But Byfield & Stutzle both have the potential to be as good at some point in their development as he is & there is no guarantee he will be better. When we look at different rankings & we have already seen some wild & large differences where some people rank some prospects. Obviously, it will come down to what our own scouts prefer in players & that at times becomes worrisome when they draft a player like Lodin. Hopefully, they do well in this draft & make us proud.
Today most teams place players in tiers & if PD is saying that the group of prospects from 4 to 12 are all in the same tier, that might just mean they value #12 as much as #4, or as close. If the decision comes down to two prospects who are equally as good would it not make sense to draft the guy that the team might need more & would improve the team overall? BPA IMO is becoming more & more clouded when fewer & fewer people can agree who that player is exactly & the differences become less obvious.
I think the generally accepted belief regarding "Best player available" is the general consensus (i.e majority) of opinion from the so-called experts that truly dedicate time and resources all year to get to know the prospects (i.e, Button, Mckenzie, ISS, THN, CSI etc.) and you take the "majority" ranking for each player. Most of the time the fans will develop a bit of a "sense" with regards to who is the BPA at that spot and which player is still available that seems to be dropping.
For example, I like to use the following site to look at a compilation of "experts" on one page and how they ranked the prospects pre-draft:
2013 NHL Draft Prospect Rankings
If you click the link and take a look, you get a general idea of where the prospects rank, however keep in mind 2013 was pretty complicated due to the discrepancy in opinions over who should go 1-3, however, it was known which players would go top 5, just not necessarily in order. Specifically if you look at the pick the Flyers made at #11, Samuel Morin, and look at the link i posted above, you will find that only ONE expert had him top 10, the rest had him well below, ISS even had him #30.
Now whether or not the Flyers thought he was "BPA" is besides the point because every player picked by their team will tell you that he was probably BPA. But by picking Morin at #11, the Flyers missed out on Max Domi (12th) and Wennberg (14th) both of whom were ranked higher than Morin in almost every mock draft.
2014 NHL Draft Prospect Rankings
^^^ In 2014, if you look at the mock-draft, you will find that the majority had Nylander ahead of Jake Virtanen and Haydn Fleury, yet both were picked ahead of him even though he is arguably a way better player than both. David Pastrnak was selected as high as 16th and 17th by some experts and also 20th-25th, yet he was drafted at #25 while players like Bleackley, Tuch, Schmaltz, and Vrana who the experts ranked lower, were picked ahead of him.
2015 NHL Draft Prospect Rankings
In 2015, Travis Konecny was ranked top 15 by almost every expert on that page, even as high as 7th by Pronman, yet he dropped to 24th overall while guys like Colin White, De Brusk, Senyshyn, and Evegni (not Andrei) Svechnikov were picked before even though they were ranked lower.
I suppose my long-winded post above is basically to imply that even a rookie, idiot G.M who has never watched hockey can simply look at those links, do an average of all the rankings, and still make a good decision just by doing that.
