“I don’t mean any disrespect but you’ve lifted your argument from a click-baity hack and also you’re lying about having watched Stramel play.”
You’re doing a terrible job of not meaning any disrespect. The fact is that no one sees in Stramel what you see. That could be a sign that literally everyone but you is an idiot, or it could mean that you’re wrong about this one. You can believe whatever you want.
Stramel may have been better than Leonard and Smith last year (if you ignore that they both out-scored Stramel at last year’s U18 by PPG), but that doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is development. Smith and Leonard (and Perreault) developed a huge amount this year, whereas Stramel stagnated.
Yes, Stramel made last years U20 team (although Smith might have cracked it if he hadn’t been hurt during summer camp), like I said, because he is ideal for a fourth line role, which Smith isn’t. I can tell you who is going to be better at this year’s WJC.
I didn’t suffer through a half dozen unbearably boring Wisconsin games last year purely to scout Stramel for you to claim I didn’t because you don’t agree with me.
Ah okay, you get challenged on what you said and you just resort to calling someone else an idiot because you put forth a weak argument that is now being exposed.
Stramel played down with the U17's multiple times during his U18 season because he needed extra games after being injured the first half of the season, and he outplayed all those players pretty clearly. That's what I'm referring to. This has been a talking point that I've seen mentioned by numerous people that are high on the player. Those that tend to say he has low upside and is a passenger conveniently missed these games and have no real rebuttal to it. It's important because it gets to the crux of the issue. We literally saw him against these players, and he was better.
Is he better now? Hard to know. Is he so much worse and a third round pick with bottom 6 upside? Seems quite doubtful. It's always hard to compare late birthdays to early birthdays, but it shouldn't be ignored out of hand when there's evidence Stramel was better than these players like 15 months ago. Because really, the whole argument about Stramel having low upside comes back to stats from purely this season. No one dared suggest it beforehand. If Stramel played junior and had a bunch of points, no one would suggest he has low upside. If he was playing for a decent team like Minnesota or Michigan and was the 6th leading scorer amongst forwards there (25 points and 32 points respectively), this would be a pretty difficult argument to make. And in fact, Stramel actually was pretty good at the WJC. He showed that when you put good players around him, he's a very impactful player, so we saw him in an environment last season outside of Wisconsin and he played well.
We'll have to see what happens, but it seems like your whole argument amounts to "box-score looked bad this year", and no I didn't say you didn't watch him play and I'm not saying that now. If I wanted to say that, I would've. I don't tend to accuse people of that because it's not something I'd know. What I said is that you've put forth a lazy argument. It's one that a lot of people that are only looking at the boxscores put forth, the one's that rank him 3rd round. If you want to distinguish yourself from that type of view, maybe put forth a better argument than you have. And by the way, how does no one see what I do if an NHL team literally picked him much higher than the public consensus? Wouldn't that suggest they do?
