He updated the list... It's still pretty rancid.
I'm not sure he's ever watched Simon Edvinsson play. He still refers to Michael Brandsegg-Nygard as "Average sized" but I guess I don't look at a 6' 1" 207 lb 18 year old as "Average sized" by NHL standards. Maybe for a position player in college football?
This is one issue where I think Pronman is generallly getting it right. You refer to a player's size relative to NHL averages, and the height is the biggest predictor of how much weight they can gain. A player like MBN (who I'm the highest on) might not get much bigger. However he's already a freakishly strong prospect and stronger than most NHLers, which ought to push aside the size discussion for this particular player.
The simplest mistake that people make in scouting is not imagining how players size up vs real NHLers. Like a 6'0 power forward in junior is going to look small in the NHL. Carson Rehkopf is a 6'2 dominant power forward in junior who might look average, or worse if his compete issue persists, in the NHL. Denton Mateychuk was built like a square already in junior, just an inch on the short side, he looks positively tiny in the NHL. Thankfully he has a top end brain.
Is it just me or does he do a better job of plugging into what teams are thinking at draft time than evaluating prospects himself?
With Bob-father in semi-retirement there really isn't anybody else I trust to do the former but Pronman might be the closest.
The idea any one guy can have a correct eval on 100s of prospects around the globe was always questionable but things go off the rails with him pretty quickly I find
That's how I view Pronman - the absolute best right now at gathering scout opinion and sharing it with us heathens. But there are some issues.
When it comes to ranking prospects he can be very stubborn, and it really shows when he's ranking already in the NHL players. I actually like to some degree that he tunes out the noise on junior players and leaves aside a lot of the analytics (which doesn't translate league to league), but you should pay attention to that stuff for guys who are already in the NHL. Like looking at a stretch of 3 players in the 20s on his list - Faber, Kent Johnson, and Seth Jarvis. KJ I would put higher but I understand having him lower, he's an upside pick who hasn't done it yet in the NHL. But Faber and Jarvis are already pushing All Star level in the NHL. Why is Pronman ignoring that?
Leaving aside the stats in juniors can be smart scouting, doing it for already in the NHL players is ludicrous. Jarvis, FWIW, is currently the top analytics forward in Carolina, ahead of Aho, Svech, and Necas.
Yeah Pronman is a good source for when he talks about what real NHL scouts say about players, but he has gone a bit overboard with size. It seems like every couple of years he swings way too far one way, then realizes he's been getting some players wrong, then completely shifts gears. If I'm not mistaken, he was obsessed with smaller players a few years ago
He made just one big swing and that was 5-10 years ago, I can't remember exactly when.
Someone explained to him that the public discussion of upside in hockey is backwards relative to the inside discussion, and backwards relative to how it is done in other sports. We were talking about 5'9 forwards scoring 130 pts in junior and talking about their sensational upside, when really it is the 6'6 gangly kid who had sensational upside, if he could gain coordination.
Now that I think of it - this happens to be essentially a Matt Savoie vs Maveric Lamoureux comparison. It would have looked absurd if you wrote on HF in 2022 that Lamoureux had higher upside than Savoie.
Anyways I give Pronman credit for overhaulling his whole approach based on the evidence.
Yep, there is a lot of inconsistency there. MBN is going to play at 215-225 when he's fully grown and putting him as averaged sized is just more of his cursory silliness.
What makes you think MBN will play at 215-225? Like perhaps people have analyzed his shirtless frame and figured out that he has room for it. In MBN's case, he's already freakishly strong and might be better off playing at 207, he'll win his battles already at that weight and can focus on playing at the ideal weight for speed and endurance.
Sometimes there are prospects who are drafted at league average dimensions - meaning a height and weight relative to each other, in this case 6'1 207 - and they stay that way. "He's already filled out", I'm sure you've heard the phrase used.
Wheeler definitely has his types and I think is slow to change his opinion on guys almost to a fault, but he is at least pretty consistent and I think has very well-thought, informative pieces on almost everyone. Pronman is just all over the place all the time and not a particularly good or interesting writer either.
Wheeler is a good writer and Pronman is a bad writer. And I think you're right about the consistency and the details too.
But in terms of the scouting philosophy, Pronman has moved closer to how NHL scouts think and Wheeler is more stubborn about it. He's still getting smitten with all of these Vitali Abramov and Jordan Dumais types. That's hard for me to look past.
I feel like Wheeler and Pronman would make a better scouting team, if they worked together, and Wheeler did all the writing.
