What’s his downside that leads to some people having Hagens and/or Martone over him? Because he sounds/looks like a complete player.
Misa's biggest flaw in my opinion is that he can be careless with the puck on his stick (with his passes too) and lose it at inopportune moments and/or in critical areas of the ice where the puck being lost means that an odd-man rush is coming the other way.
That kind of comes with the territory when you're your team's biggest offensive threat and most puck-dominant player, always trying to have the puck on your stick and creating offense.
But in Misa's case I think he tries to do too much instead of being more patient (and accepting that some of his shifts are gonna be low-event ones), and at times ends up costing his team some goals in that way, probably more than would be typical of your standard high-end offensive player in the OHL.
The thing is, when you cough-up the puck at the rate Misa has been this season, normally you get yelled-at by your coach, adapt, and then those turnovers kind of stop.
Except that Misa is a bit of an odd case in the sense that he hasn't really improved much in that direction, still keeps challenging defensemen 1-on-1 and being uncannily aggressive whilst trying to create offense.
And that means that Misa still turns the puck over quite a bit even up to his recent games, though I have seen some modicum of improvement on that front of late.
Some people see those turnovers that Misa keeps making, and then they start saying that Misa is a bad defensive player because of the odd-man rushes that come with the amount of puck-touches and aggressive offensive plays that Misa tries to make. That's where I figure that a lot of the "one-dimensional player" comments come from.
Others will say that those careless/over-aggressive plays and turnovers of Misa's might potentially be a sign of "non-elite" Hockey IQ on his part.
I don't think those things are true though.
Misa's defensive skills are quite good when he focuses on that aspect of his game and doesn't try to do too much, we saw that last year.
I just think that given how Saginaw's roster is this year that Misa's been asked to do a lot of the heavy-lifting offensively and is currently "sacrificing" a bit of his defensive game in favor of more offense for his team, probably with his coach's blessing.
If Michael Misa adjusts a bit and plays with more patience I think he'll be quite good defensively even in the NHL once he will have "settled-in". He certainly has the tools for it at least.
As for the "Hockey IQ not being great" part of the equation, well, I'd say that the jury is still out on if Misa's IQ is or will be elite by NHL standards. That will come with time and more viewings of Misa at the highest level.
But it is easy to see, even in Junior, that Misa has a good Hockey brain given how fast/accurate some of his reads on the ice are and how great some of his offensive decision-making has been this year. We just don't know if Misa's IQ is plain "good" or if it is "great" yet.
So yeah, carelessness with the puck is Misa's biggest weakness so far this season and something he will need to sort out going forward.
I just personally think that it's quite a bit of an easy fix considering how high-end the rest of Michael Misa's attributes as a Hockey player are. But then again there's a reason why he's rated so highly on basically all Draft lists.
