StK, when you say "the guy looks no better with the puck on his stick today, as he did in his 17-year-old draft season", are you saying that because you are watching a lot of Kitchener Rangers games? And that you also watched a lot of their games his draft year?
I am genuinely asking the question. Because if that's the case, then I will take your word for it and stop talking about Hall.
But if you're just basing all of this on numbers and player comparisons, then I'm sorry but that means very little. Because you can't talk about how a player 'looks' if you're not actually looking.
And you know what, if he is a bust as you suggest, then who cares? There are far better prospects who have busted, both within and outside this organization. And there will be a lot more down the line.
It just seems everybody has a personal vendetta against that particular draft pick, and I'm not sure why.
Have I watched all 17 games of the Kitchener Rangers this season? No. I've watched 4 full games, and watched 1 partial game (was flipping between it and another show), and in that time I didn't see a player who had improved at all (or any more than very, very marginally) from when I saw him play as a 17 year old, the year the Pens originally drafted him.
Maybe I just so happened to watch the 5 worst games he played this season. But I somehow doubt it. That would be quite the coincidence that the 5 times I watched him he looked like Rob Scuderi with the puck on his stick, but in the 12 games I missed he showed a vast improvement in his puck skills.
He plays with more authority or confidence, for lack of a better description, when he's on the ice. But that comes with experience. Even kids who never amount to a thing start to play with a bit more swagger when they're 19/20 years old compared to when they were 16/17 rookies or sophomores. But his actual ability with the puck on his stick -- puckhandling, passing, shooting, etc. -- hasn't made any sort of noticeable improvement.
His lack of production just reinforces when I see with the "eye test".
I also don't think there's an agenda. I wanted for him to be like a Travis Hamonic; a physical defensive guy who breaks out offensively after being drafted. But that simply hasn't happened. He's Clark Seymour/Reid McNeil all over again, but instead of being a late draft pick, Pittsburgh for some reason took him in the 3rd round.