Everybody within the hockey world uses potential and ceiling as the same thing.
No they don’t. Not a single prospect person uses that interchangeable. Especially so soon after the draft.
How often do you see “if player puts it all together, they could be a top line player but more realistically they’ll end up a good third liner”
That makes literally no sense. Why would you say “his potential is 2nd liner, but if everything goes right he could be a 1st liner”? Potential means “this is the best case scenario”.
For fear of propagating a semantics argument, potential is simply a poor word for this purpose. The proper definition of potential, “showing or having the capacity to develop into something in the future,” is binary and does not by itself offer gradation. Something either has the potential to be something else or it doesn’t. To describe the quality of subject potential with clarity a modifier is required (e.g. high-end potential, limited potential, top-line potential, bottom-pairing potential, AHL starter potential, etc.)
In the context of hockey prospects I’ve always interpreted potential to mean the range between ceiling and floor
projections of a prospect, containing a realistic/most-likely projection somewhere between the two. Where in this context projection means “forecast of a future outcome based on current knowledge.”
Now, if someone was to provide an unqualified projection (that is a projection without any description of what type of projection it is) I would interpret it as “a forecast of the most-likely outcome as of this moment” or “a realistic potential outcome”.
Likewise, if someone says “X has Y potential” without further qualification, I would interpret that as their ceiling projection, because people don’t typically use this sort of language to describe some intermediate point in a range. While they could, and it could technically be true, that person would be a pedantic asshole. Typically people prefer to highlight either end of a spectrum. And as the floor potential for the large majority of prospects is “not an NHL player” there is little utility in using this convention to highlight floor projections. But really, using potential in this way without any clarifying language is just pretty ambiguous.
So the language I would use, and I think what I’ve seen in some places, is “Celebrini has franchise player ceiling, projects as a top-line center, and has a top-6 floor” where the last bit is optional, as the floor projection for most prospects can safety be assumed as “not an NHL player”.
In short, y’all are Englishing wrong
