How many kids have truly awful work ethics versus truly good work ethics though? I think the game has become modernized to the point that almost every prospect works hard already. There's the odd exception, but for the most part the game is to the point where you have to put in the work to get noticed. There's too much talent in the game now.
So I tend to roll my eyes a bit when I hear about work ethic with players because I think they pretty much all put in the work already. I don't want a prospect where their "thing" is work ethic (and I'm not saying Pickering is this - I like the pick.). I want to hear that a guy has the talent to become something good.
I also think if a guy is lacking at all in work ethic or attitude, that can be worked on. But you can't teach raw talent. I'm more impressed that Pickering is 6 4 and can skate than I am that he has a good work ethic.
I also think it gets overblown both ways, though. I don't think it's true that Kessel is/was lazy but that's the vibe people get. I don't think Sidney Crosby works *that* amazingly harder than anybody else. He works insanely hard, but so do a lot of guys.
Even if I agreed with every word of this, I'd still regard it as an argument for the value of work ethic. This board routinely geeks out and emotes about all sorts of small differences in talent and numbers. Why should work ethic, which can after all add compound interest to so many of those other small differences, be seen as any less valuable?
And tbh, I do mostly agree with the bolded. On the scale of every human, the difference between Kessel and Crosby - which is about as large as exists in the NHL - isn't huge. Nevertheless, the fact that pretty much every player, coach, reporter, executive, scout and so on makes a huge deal out of the difference suggests pretty much everyone near the game believes those differences in work ethic matter.
That's just in the NHL. If we're talking the draft, and a bunch of 18 year olds who mostly never had to work super hard to be the best player around, then I reckon the range in work ethic is going to be pretty large. Can it change? Sure, and I reckon most of them learn to work harder as part of the process. But at the same time the world would look very different if gaining a new work ethic was easy and I'm guessing the correlation between busts and low work ethics - or low coachability, or big egos - is pretty strong. Also if stuff like skating, shooting, and so on are parts of raw talent, you can 100% coach that. Usually to players with strong work ethics...
Nobody wants a guy who's work ethic and nothing else. Tbh, I've never seen a prospect described that way. But raw talent isn't enough for 99% of the league either. This isn't an either or. It's a both, and I don't see why anyone wouldn't want as much of both as possible. Ditto all of the other stuff the interview is trying to gauge.
