Since we're apparently re-litigating Wilson's development - staying in the OHL was the better move for allowing him to develop his offensive game. It took Wilson a long time to get comfortable playing with the puck on his stick in the NHL, even despite the annual experiments with him on the first line early in his career (which always ended in frustration and coach's venting that the play died on his stick too often). In the OHL he would have been afforded more opportunities to grow that aspect of his game. More opportunities to learn how to establish a cycle. More opportunities to carry the puck into the zone rather than just being a hunter-killer missile on the fore check trying to blow up the opposing puck carrier. He would have been given more time on the powerplay to build his instincts there. And he would have been doing it against top pairing in the OHL, not scrubs. He fought more in the NHL playing against goons than he would have fought in the OHL playing against opposing top lines (although he and Max Domi probably would have gone once or twice). And I don't believe for a second that he would have just overpowered the likes of Aaron Ekblad, Adam Pelech, Darnell Nurse, or Nikita Zadorov - and those are the types of D he would have often been skating against.
Wilson with more time in the OHL hopefully is able to find his offensvie game in the NHL quicker (he took 6 years before he broke 20 goals for the first time, and a feat he's only accomplished 3 times in his 11 year career) and hopefully have spent a lot less time in the penalty box or suspended. He was forced to play a thug role early in his career, and his development suffered for it. He may well be a better offensive player today, or at least one who's more comfortable in terms of establishing the cycle (there's no reason he shouldn't be able to cycle along the boards as well as Joel Ward or Steve Konowalchuk), if he had spent more time in the OHL refining his offensive game.
This is such an EA Sports way of seeing things, as I addressed above. It's not as simple as collapsing a player's potential window because it's about how the individual handles the development.
Who's to say he doesn't have to un-learn habits he picks up in the OHL to be productive in the NHL? Like... taking an extra touch too often, maybe an extra hitch in his shot to focus on picking corners, these are things you can do and get used to against lesser competition that come back to bite you in the end. I don't think there's an amount of development that was going to turn Wilson into a zone entry wizard, so why bother? Hands and skills clearly improved anyway, and you might as well get them against NHL timing.
I also think cherry picking some NHL names and saying Wilson would be not only line-matched but essentially shadowed by them to the point that he's never abusing weaker players is a little ridiculous when also posting about learning to establish a cycle (i.e. learning to identify and attack weak points in coverage, force defensive switches, etc). First, that's just not how hockey works and we know that. Second, there are other teams on other nights, it's just not always going to draw down that way.
I don't think anybody's saying that the route was
the most optimized, I think this whole discussion centers around the fact that he should have been able to test the AHL earlier. But since we don't have crystal ball statistics I'm not pressed about what they did.
Like I said before, there's something to be said for coming up and showing to be pretty damn tough as a young pup for a confidence builder, and he built a good game out of "well I can push them around, so how do I use the space?"
