The Sens obviously saw this kind of potential in him to keep their pick and pass on some great players like Zadina. But yet some people here didnt have him in the top 15. Thats pretty inexcusable..
Hfboards is a really puzzling place, and probably the least reliable source for rating prospects pre draft (dont get me wrong we have some bright people here, but the noise mostly drowns them out).
For every golden prospect & complete bust that gets called correctly here, there's probably 100 other misses that are equally telling. Its a far worse ratio than real NHL teams drafting records.
If you polled every active NHL scout (there are about 400 or so) you would get some pretty extreme variation and opinions. Everyone is going to get some things right and wrong. It really depends on if you consider the process people use to arrive at their conclusions as effective and whether putting faith in, rather than just judging everything as who got what right and who got what wrong. People are trying to project 17 and 18-year-olds, which is always going to have a great deal of fluctuation. I'm happy to have personally been on the right side of the equation when it came to Brady (or at least look to be so far in his NHL career), and I think I fared pretty well with Pettersson. But, I know I also got a sizable amount wrong and will continue to have my hits and misses.
I know which sources I put heavy weight into, who opinions I trust, and have some faith in my own eyes. No single person here is going to be adequately informed on the 215 or so draft prospects to adequately rate them on a highly informed level (this is a 10 to 20 man job for most NHL teams), or the hundreds of players in multiple teams farm systems. Look some people value statistics. I do to a certain extent, but I am not dogmatic in my view of them, but adjusting and using them is highly complementary to live viewings. People went way to extreme on Brady's stats, and let them overshadow the player he was or his particular circumstances. Loving stats will help you be right on Alex Debrincat, but wrong on Brady Tkachuk. Although, I would also caution that not all people who were wrong on Tkachuk just arrived at that conclusion because of stats.
Personally, I had Brady in a tier behind Dahlin and Svech, with Dobson and Zadina. Right now, there is a good chance I was wrong on Kotkaniemi who I viewed as being in the 7-10 range.