Which late rounders are looking better than our first rounders?
Well Kiiskinen was referred to in the initial post. It's somewhat debatable whether he should count as a late round pick for us considering that we traded for him
Buchelnikov is looking incredible.
Augustine looks great and wins like crazy.
Finnie, Lombardi and Mazur all look good too.
I think you could argue that Augustine looks better than Cossa. I think you could argue that the forwards above look better than MBN, Danielson, and Kasper (to a lesser extent considering his recent success in the NHL).
Now some of those guys are second rounders so it's debatable whether they should be included. I also personally still have Danielson, MBN and Kasper above any of their late round compatriots. I prefer Augustine to Cossa but I understand why most can project on tools and conclude that Cossa has the better future.
So ultimately I think my real stance is that our first round picks have broken themselves into two tiers and many of our later round picks have climbed into the lesser tier. There's the Raymond, Seider, Edvinsson and ASP tier. Those guys all took off post draft, immediately adopted a trajectory that suggested they would be top of the lineup players. The former three are currently living up to that expectation, but even before they made, at least to me, their current performance wouldn't have been at all surprising. These are the guys where they developed so well that you're constantly trying to talk yourself out of insane, unfair lofty expectations. "Sure ASP just won his second WJC best defenseman award, and is leading the SHL defensive scoring and controls play every time he steps out there, etc but he's sort of small, won't have such an easy time beating NHL goalies from a distance and can't skate like Makar so I shouldn't get my hopes up too high. He's not guaranteed to be a top 3 offensive defenseman in the world." Their success feels inevitable, like it's almost already happened and we're just waiting on history to catch up.
Then there's the Cossa, Danielson, Kasper and MBN tier. They're all fine. They all project to be NHL players and have top of the lineup potential. But they also all feel like they could fizzle out into just okay players. I'm constantly trying to talk myself into believing in them. "Sure Danielson didn't score, and he turned over the puck a lot and he got out muscled a lot and I wish he'd shoot more, etc but he has a lot of obvious tools and it's hard to put up points in the AHL, he's focusing on being responsible and he'll develop physically so I shouldn't be too harsh judging his performances. He has a chance to be a top 6 player." I can talk myself into the possibility that they develop into top of the lineup players, but I know that to some extent I believe that because I want to. Their success feels like a dream of the future- technically possible but ephemeral, ethereal, and evitable.
I think that Buch, Finnie, Lombardi, Augustine and Kiiskinen are very much in that second tier. If you want to rate Buch above MBN or whatever, I don't think that's a bad take.
