Fifth Avenue Forum

No you haven’t

Pretty sure half of them were in OT last year

Letang makes hard plays - not difficult, but like makes hard passes, takes hard strides...works. I've seen more intensity and purpose from an over-60 men's league game. Guys around you are counting on you. Show some urgency. And take the play that is in front of you. Like the two dudes wide open on your forehand side.

Finished the draft class, edited my post on page 7: http://www.fifthavenueforum.com/forum/v ... 0#p1162320

Abysmal

Outside of Yager, who I'd have rated as a B player probably. They're all pretty easy ND's for me, except maybe Scooter Foster or whatever the kid from the 67's is named...maybe he'd be a weak C, but that's probably pretty generous...

So, using my list (which, again, is almost exclusively U.S. guys this year because I didn't have time to do a lot of crossover work), here's what I would have done...

14. Matthew Wood (15th to Nsh), also would have considered Gavin Brindley (34 to CBJ)
91. Jayden Perron (94 to Car), also would have considered Nikita Ishimnikov (155 to Col) or Jayson Shaughabay (115 to TB)
142. Zach Schulz (177 to NYI)
174, 217, 223 I would have needed some help because my list extinguished quickly (so did everyone's actually, a lot of teams said that their lists ran out in the 4th or 5th round, which says it's a pretty weak draft...maybe a good group from 10ish to 40ish, but before and after, maybe not...anyhow, Ethan Whitcomb (undrafted), Max Weilandt (undrafted), Artyom Kashtanov (undrafted), Mikey Burchill (undrafted), Cale Ashcroft (undrafted) would have been under consideration at the end if I had no help and no knowledge of any other leagues...

There’s always hope of scooping up some of those UDFAs to make this off-season seem a bit more robust

Just dropping this bag of **** here because he's technically a prospect now...

Dillon Hamaliuk (LW/RW) - Injury prone big man. Only played a handful of ECHL games last year as a 2000 birthday. Basically a goon. He can't skate, he has average hockey sense at best, he's remarkably unskilled for a 2nd round pick (he literally pushes the puck ahead of him in the NZ at the ECHL level, it looks like the over 35 men's leagues)...but man does he hit and he hits hard. He can knock players off their wheels in positions where you normally can't. He won't play in the NHL, but he's good for the AHL because he can steal the other team's per diem and bring it back for the boys - so long Subway, hello Jersey Mike's!

I imagine he was included for contract limits? Or just to make WBS more of a legitimate team? Those are the only two scenarios that make sense

Yeah, probably just dumping the contract of a no chancer. SJ is also probably trying to clean out the mistakes of the old GM, but man, given what Grier has gotten for Meier, Burns, and Karlsson, I imagine he's not gonna get too much more time at the wheel.

But also, WBS is a barren wasteland, so...this guy hits. Legare was a grindy boy, so there's a natural replacement there. Legare could actually kind of handle the puck and this guy cannot. But still, they could sign you and I right now and be better off down there...that team stinks.

Pensburgh are doing their annual Top 25 Under 25 thing and it's about as bleak as you expect so far:

#25 Daniel Laatsch - big, can't play
#24 Cooper Foster - ceiling: Zach Aston-Reese
#23 Thimo Nickl - Austrian
#22 Dillon Hamaliuk - lol
#21 Mikhail Ilyin - ceiling: Sergei Plotnikov

hows casey pierro-zabotel doing?

Top 25?!?! Those poor souls.

CPZ is done-zo. 39 pts in 63 in the Cheese in 19-20 and that was it. 3rd in scoring on his own ECHL team in scoring...on a team where I've only heard of one of the top 10 guys.

So, he's doing well...

Can we get a petition to dubas to hire Mikey and just let him make the calls on all the 4th - 7th round picks?

I don’t know if continuing to draft guys in those rounds with an upside of “could be a 4th liner, maybe, but probably just a third liner in the AHL” is a good long term organizational pattern

Yup.

I mean, the scouting report on Laatsch pretty much reads: could be a sleeper if he ever learns to play hockey.

25 prospects? I probably couldn't name 5.

You gotta figure most of these guys ceilings are 2nd liner on A level beer league

Top 25?!?! Those poor souls.

CPZ is done-zo. 39 pts in 63 in the Cheese in 19-20 and that was it. 3rd in scoring on his own ECHL team in scoring...on a team where I've only heard of one of the top 10 guys.

So, he's doing well...

I'm assuming the Cheese became the replacement name for the Coast once the league covered both coasts.

Is he coaching now?

Yeah, Cheese = ECHL.

I hope not.

Did I make the list?

Pensburgh are doing their annual Top 25 Under 25 thing and it's about as bleak as you expect so far:

So do we go with
"Half these guys I've never heard of and the ones I have heard of are way past their prime"

or

"Most of these guys never had a prime"

Ok, I don't follow this stuff as closely as the rest of you guys, but going through Mikey's ratings, Jarventie stands out, not in a good way. I'm just curious why some of the pre-draft articles say he had 2nd round potential, but then we get him in the 7th and obviously the other team's scouts felt likewise or they would have picked him up. Is it all due to size? I mean, you always hope for a lucky gem in the final rounds, but the predraft vs where he actually was picked don't line up.

Most of the media out there doesn't watch the players or don't have any evaluation skills. It becomes a game of telephone. Someone sees a ranking, they take that and re-arrange it, then the next guy takes that and re-arranges that, then someone watches some YT highlights of a couple of guys and boosts one guy way up, and then another person goes "ah, that guy is on the rise" and their next ranking puts him even higher to be edgy...it's 90% nonsense out there, maybe more...

Most of the media out there doesn't watch the players or don't have any evaluation skills. It becomes a game of telephone. Someone sees a ranking, they take that and re-arrange it, then the next guy takes that and re-arranges that, then someone watches some YT highlights of a couple of guys and boosts one guy way up, and then another person goes "ah, that guy is on the rise" and their next ranking puts him even higher to be edgy...it's 90% nonsense out there, maybe more...

That’s how I see a lot of baseball prospect rankings.

The “rankings” are meaningless I think. There are maybe a handful of baseball prospect writers that actually have evaluation skills, but then you couple that with them really just maybe looking at a snapshot of a guy. I feel like you have to mine the blurbs for when they quote a real scout talking about a player.

Most of the media out there doesn't watch the players or don't have any evaluation skills. It becomes a game of telephone. Someone sees a ranking, they take that and re-arrange it, then the next guy takes that and re-arranges that, then someone watches some YT highlights of a couple of guys and boosts one guy way up, and then another person goes "ah, that guy is on the rise" and their next ranking puts him even higher to be edgy...it's 90% nonsense out there, maybe more...

That’s how I see a lot of baseball prospect rankings.

The “rankings” are meaningless I think. There are maybe a handful of baseball prospect writers that actually have evaluation skills, but then you couple that with them really just maybe looking at a snapshot of a guy. I feel like you have to mine the blurbs for when they quote a real scout talking about a player.

I've always been curious about this, but know nothing about baseball. It just seems like around the trade deadline that a team trades Tony Gwynn and gets back "the #22, #45 and #178 best MLB prospects" and I've always wondered why that seemed so, ummm, "agreed upon" (?) for lack of a better term...

Thinking about it on the hockey side, I know that my top 10 prospects will not only be in a different order than the next guy, but there might be 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 different names even...

I've always been curious about this, but know nothing about baseball. It just seems like around the trade deadline that a team trades Tony Gwynn and gets back "the #22, #45 and #178 best MLB prospects" and I've always wondered why that seemed so, ummm, "agreed upon" (?) for lack of a better term...

Thinking about it on the hockey side, I know that my top 10 prospects will not only be in a different order than the next guy, but there might be 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 different names even...

I have some high level theories, but the overall ecosystem for baseball prospects might be more complex than other sports.

- The draft and international signing phases
- Different control rules for NCAA picks, High School Picks, and International Picks
- The extended control period teams have (combined with incentives for service time manipulation) and the value of control years for system guys versus FA cost
- The economics of baseball (who pays for FA players and who relies FA runoff and internal development)
- Prospect writer industry (MLB.com, BP, BA, Fangraphs, Athletic (Keith Law), ESPN (Kiley McDaniel).
- Competing incentives and ethical questions that arise from prospect hyping. There is incentive for a team to hype their prospects to increase their perceived value, especially for the big teams (Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox) who will be dealing those prospects for established players.
- Tanking and prospect hoarding

I'm sure someone has done some work on these lists to test their veracity, right? Does "the #14 prospect in MLB" over the years actually mean anything...? Does that mean you're almost certainly getting a player...? I don't know. I don't get how baseball scouting works, I don't get the sheer scale of it, I don't get pitchers vs hitters values, I don't get any of it...