It’s less his hockey IQ and more his style of play, so I do consider it a drafting mistake.
And also bad luck, since no one ahead of us screwed up. It’s not hard to see why they passed over Rossi, so it was Holtz/Quinn/Perfetti.
From the 2020 Black Book:
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You have to ask how a player is going to score in the NHL. There’s a lot of limitations to his game just in this section.
He couldn’t score with speed, was a perimeter player and his shot creation was iffy.
You have to be a very exceptional scoring winger to get away with slowing down play and trying to find soft ice. And I mean ridiculously exceptional and he’s not that.
Here’s more, the player he is now is all there, it wasn’t a secret. (Lack of agility, good playmaking, etc)
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Zetterlund doesn’t have better Hockey IQ, and he has worse on-ice vision, he just plays a meat and potatoes, north/south game that translates much better to the NHL.
Zetterlund’s development obviously went really well, like a dream really, but his play style didn’t fundamentally change much either.