How much of prospects busting is "their fault"?

[Horvat1C]

But at the same time Virtanen and Juolevi were bad.

Yup, nobody bats 1000%.

 

[Warh1ppy]

It's 50/50 for sure

Hyper talented kids with the weight of an entire organization and their insane fanbase on their shoulders expected to come in and produce at Crosby/McDavid levels in their first year or else they're busts. It's a lot for kids who are 18-19 years old and the mental and physical toll it can play is immense

vs

Owners/Coaches/GMs who demand nothing but the best of these kids. Kids who are insane finesse players told by coaches to start checking , back checking, hitting the body of a grown as man 5 inches taller and 40 pounds heavier and forced to play a game that they aren't successful at. GMs who refuse to protect these kids and surround them with the talent they need to produce comfortably. Owners who treat these kids like they're essentially slave bought and paid for.

Ya it's an all over issue for sure.

 

[JKG33]

I think it varies. Some prospects play too little and some prospects play too much. The issue with Byfield has been while he’s been very mediocre, he hasn’t been given a green light to go screw up. He’s been unlucky with that. But also, the times where he does play you rarely notice him doing anything important.

You're kidding me right? Byfield's been given far more than he's earned, including a spot on the top line last year.

While I do think there's instances of teams screwing up a player, most times prospects (and drafts) just aren't that great

 

[WarriorofTime]

Busts are created through expectations set by analyzing children playing against other children. Of course development and self-determination matter but projecting what children will achieve as adults is pretty imperfect.

Indeed. Players are basically assessed based on how they do against their own cohort, and it's difficult to say how that will project when they're playing the very best players from all over the world with about 95 % of players falling within about a 15 year age spread.

And even amongst the age cohort, players have a wide variety of potential growth between the time they're drafted and when they're in their prime about a decade later.

The results of the NHL Drafts would vary dramatically depending on time of draft if players were drafted at age 13, 15, 19 or 21 compared to how they end up. Drafts are very much a snapshot of time of scouts making reasonable guesses as to how prospects will progress.

 

[Bank Shot]

The Rangers had many more roadblocks on forward than on defense (Panarin, Zibanejad, Kreider all occupying spots at the top on the lineup).

I think with young players there needs to be a grace period where they are allowed to play in positions without getting the rug pulled out from under them. Anybody needs time to adjust to the speed and physicality of the NHL and then figure out how they can apply their own skillset in that new environment. Basically you need a decent sample size of a player (especially a rookie you are hoping will be elite) before you can evaluate whether or not they can sink or swim.

The Canucks didn't bury Pettersson or Boeser to force them to learn a defensive game even though they weren't great defensively. The Devils didn't bury Jack Hughes after 2 rough seasons as a teenager. The Senators didn't bury Stutzle after lackluster team results. Even Torts doesn't bury Michkov at the bottom of the lineup (although he does manage him). Unless you are Crosby, McDavid, Matthews, Bedard, etc. level, you have to be patient and truly develop your potential star players into stars.

Both Tyler Seguin and Joe Thornton played small roles in their rookie seasons and they turned out fine. If you have the talent and skillset, you will show it when given an opportunity.

Its true that Lafrenierre and Kakko didn't get huge roles regardless of their play.

You are kind of advocating giving prospects big roles whether they perform or not in the short term, in order to maximize their potential. This attitude could lead to wasting on a lot of ice time on players that just don't have it IMO. There are only like 200 top six spots in the NHL and about 100 to 150 of them are locked down long term.

That doesn't leave enough top six spots for all the hot prospects being drafted every season. Most of them will fail. That is just a numbers game. You can't give every prospect 100 games in the top six just to see if they will turn out.

I don't think that is realistic is a league where the number one focus is winning hockey games. it's a little different on teams where they don't have any other options, but the coaches and players are still trying to win games and should play the players that are most likely to produce those results.

 

[Spirits]

With Kaapo Kakko, a former 2nd overall that has failed to meet expectations despite glimpses of the skill and smarts he was drafted for, being traded and a general negativity swirling around the Rangers (a team that seemingly struggles more than average with developing prospects and young players) in recent weeks, I've got to thinking about the magical "what ifs" of what prospects *could* have been in different circumstances.

It's incredibly hard to become an impact player in the NHL, and there are, seemingly, any number of reasons why a prospect might end up busting. Development may be affected in surprisingly significant ways by things as seemingly small and invisible to fans as how good your linemates are in the AHL, or what opportunities you're given when called up, or whether or not you get PP time, or how sporadic or consistent your ice time is, or what practices your team runs, or how buried you are on the depth chart, or what kind of system your coach is running and how suitable you are for it. Would an Olli Juolevi that failed to develop in Vancouver succeed if he were drafted by someone else? Would someone like Brayden Point who blossomed in Tampa Bay flounder if he were drafted one or two spots earlier? We all imagined that New York was set once they drafted Lafreniere and Kakko first and second overall: were they really just never all that talented after all, or were there systematic failures in how the Rangers introduced them into the league that stunted their ability to succeed?

The importance of all of this is underlined by players that end up "breaking out" somewhere else; while on the other hand, some players seem to have no more success when shopped around than they did on the team they already busted on to begin with (but maybe at that point the damage is already done - and failures to develop at critical developmental points cripple you as a player for good). A player like Nail Yakupov never had any success anywhere else, even after he had left the black hole of the pre-McDavid Oilers, but the pariah of the hour, Buffalo, is notorious for players developing into elite talent after they've moved on somewhere else.

This is all, ultimately, rooted in the ephemeral concepts of "talent" and "learning," which are both extremely complicated and abstract topics that hardly anyone really understands. I've always imagined that anyone who ends up drafted in the first round has plenty of talent to spare and is receptive to teaching and learning new things - so why do so many of them struggle to keep improving once they're in the NHL? Are scouts really just failing to properly assess a players ability - or lack thereof - to learn new skills and develop further in the NHL? What are teams that successfully develop talent, like Tampa Bay, doing that teams that seem to struggle, like NYR, aren't? How much is busting a psychological process, where losing all of the confidence you had in junior cripples your ability to both play at peak performance and your ability to be passionate for the game? Do we place too much blame on individual players for failing to meet expectations, or are there real failures on their part to meet the expectations of the team that drafted them? Are there any prospects that you really believed in and think could have succeeded if a few things here and there were different?

Hard to say, the Oilers destroyed so many 1st OA picks in a half decade until they were gifted a guy even that franchise couldn't ruin.

 

[GeeoffBrown]

NHL is a very hard league featuring the best hockey players in the world. I think this is the main reason some players are not as good as they were in lower leagues

 

[Horvat1C]

Both Tyler Seguin and Joe Thornton played small roles in their rookie seasons and they turned out fine. If you have the talent and skillset, you will show it when given an opportunity.

Its true that Lafrenierre and Kakko didn't get huge roles regardless of their play.

You are kind of advocating giving prospects big roles whether they perform or not in the short term, in order to maximize their potential. This attitude could lead to wasting on a lot of ice time on players that just don't have it IMO. There are only like 200 top six spots in the NHL and about 100 to 150 of them are locked down long term.

That doesn't leave enough top six spots for all the hot prospects being drafted every season. Most of them will fail. That is just a numbers game. You can't give every prospect 100 games in the top six just to see if they will turn out.

I don't think that is realistic is a league where the number one focus is winning hockey games. it's a little different on teams where they don't have any other options, but the coaches and players are still trying to win games and should play the players that are most likely to produce those results.

I wasn't advocating giving every prospect an extended look in the top-6. I was advocating giving prospects who you believe can be elite scorers extended opportunities in the top-6. With Lafreniere and Kakko being 1st and 2nd overall picks, I'm saying they should have gotten extended looks in the top-6. That doesn't apply to Cuylle even though he's been great.

Here's a list of rookies who made their debuts in the last 5 years and played at least most of the season as teenagers:

• 2023-24: Bedard, Cooley
• 2022-23: McTavish
• 2021-22: Raymond, Seider, Mercer
• 2021 (COVID): Lafreniere, Byfield, Stutzle, Drysdale, Byram
• 2019-20: Q. Hughes, J. Hughes, Kakko, Dach

For the most part, if you play in the NHL as a teenager it's because you have a chance at being an elite player. There's no cookie-cutter way to develop players and each person and situation is unique, but the players from that list who look like good players right now were given minutes at the top of the lineup. The notable exceptions are Lafreniere, Byfield, Kakko (and maybe Drysdale and Dach but I don't remember their situations well, and McTavish is a really good player suffering from being in Anaheim). Lafreniere and Kakko were buried for reasons discussed earlier and Byfield is an enigma of a player who has taken an abnormal development path. If you have a potential star and want to develop them into a star, it helps to treat them like a star.

The Rangers prioritizing winning games is one of the contributing factors to cooking Kakko and until recently Lafreniere. If they won a Cup in any of their runs over the last 3 years then nothing matters, but they didn't. It's how it goes in sports.

 

[Schennanigans]

It’s a case by case basis. Some players may have been better developed on other teams but certain players were going to be great no matter where they went. Some players just can’t put it together when they get to the nhl for a variety of reasons.

 

[Brookbank]

Have questioned this many times over the years. But i lean towards it’s MOSTLY on the prospect. And failures in development are often overrated.

I mostly agree with this. But i think there is cases where the player is just in the wrong team at the wrong time and it really derails them and their career

 

[Brookbank]

Someone give me an example of a prospect that busted on a team that wouldn’t have busted on another.

Boucher would have busted anywhere else, but I always wonder if Yakupov could have carved himself a second line power play career. 30 goal, 20 assist kind of guy if he was deployed better.

Valery Nichushkin literally busted in Dallas. Then went on to win cup and be a top 6 asset in Colorado. But I think this was mostly about age. Maybe if Sakic didn't sign that one year deal, Nich would have stayed in the KHL for his career.