Panasonic Youth said:
I do expect some consistency between professional scouts. There has been no consistency to these rankings since the lockout, if anything they should have finalized the list once hockey finished last month. Watching the ranking vary so much doesn't really give us the fans a realistic idea of what to expect.
I'm just clueless about this years draft and what to expect just like everyone else, it's madness.
The rankings aren't for the fans; it isn't about fulfilling yours or anyone else's expectations. It isn't about consistency among professional scouts, either. As the old saying goes, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," and where one team may absolutely love what Ryan O'Marra brings to the table, another team may see him entirely differently and have him well down their respective board.
Teams, like the various independent scouting sources out there, rank the players differently. You'd be surprised at how different a team's list is from the Central Scouting rankings that are published each year. NHL scouts may use the Central list as a baseline, but how much stock they place in it differs from club to club. I can tell you for a fact that the Boston Bruins don't place much emphasis on the Central listing at all. They may use it to identify certain players that they may not have seen much, but they aren't going to move prospects up or down the board based on what the CSB says about them.
If you think that all of the scouting services should agree or that the rankings should mirror one another, you are mistaken. Certain players, such as Sidney Crosby for example, are no-brainers- universally seen as the best player available. But after that, there is no way you can say that every team views Jack Johnson or Bobby Ryan or Benoit Pouliot in the same light. One guy might be 2nd on one club's list, while on another, he could be 7th or 8th. Scouts get paid to view the players and make an assessment, but just because the kid gets mondo hype on the HF Boards does not mean that every scout should love his game, too.
If any of the services like Red Line or McKeen's or what have you had predicted Blake Wheeler would be the 5th pick in 2004 before the draft, they would have been ridiculed without end on these boards, because Wheeler simply was not *publicly* ranked anywhere near the top of the draft last year. The Phoenix Coyotes proved that perception is not reality, and they obviously had him much higher than the others, right or wrong.
The draft is about the teams, not the fans. It never ceases to amaze me when fans get on these boards and boldly declare what the NHL teams will or will not do. Few outside of the teams themselves, have a clue where they view the players and how they have them ranked. This is all part of the process- to prevent other clubs from knowing their intentions so they can try and secure the player they covet. Some teams are very open about who they like prior to the draft, and some teams guard their wish list and desires like Fort Knox. Most will deliberately engage in deception plans to mask their true intentions. For example, it is often the case that if a scout/team talks extensively about a player, they have no intention of drafting them. They will talk that player up in hopes that someone else takes him. OTOH, when you ask a scout about a player and he has little to nothing to say about him, then there's a good chance that they like that player. That's a red flag for me, and the kind of response I got when asking Scott Bradley about Martins Karsums a week before the draft.
These are lessons I have learned from covering the NHL draft each year since 2000.
A lot of fans simply do not understand how the draft works. They actually believe that the Central list is gospel, and because it is released to the public and team lists aren't, is really the biggest resource they have to go on. But, don't make the mistake of believing that the CSB ranking is the end-all, be-all of the draft. You'd be shocked at how much of a disparity there is between the final CSB rankings and the average NHL team's draft board.
CSB, NHL scouts, Red Line, McKeen's and whatever other sources are out there- there is going to be disparity because not everyone sees the pecking order as cut and dried as many of us might.