It’s everybody’s favorite article of every year — that special day in the calendar when I have to take my lumps and you get to revel in my losses.
This coming season will be my ninth working for The Athletic and I’ve tried, in that time, to pull back the curtain on my work in a variety of ways. The premise is simple: If you’re going to spend money to subscribe to our coverage, you deserve to know exactly what you’re getting — you deserve transparency. I want my work to be authoritative, well-sourced and insightful, but before it can be those things, it needs to also be trustworthy.
In order to accomplish that, I regularly review my work, highlight my mistakes, check my biases and then try to adjust my scouting accordingly. Lessons learned, hopefully. My guide to scouting, updated annually, details how I do my job, from my process to how I watch games, the things I look for in players, potential blindspots and everything in between. My ranking reviews measure my track record relative to the actual draft and are meant to hold me accountable. And this piece looks back at the why and how behind the players I’ve gotten wrong over the years in an effort to better understand what I missed or over/under-emphasized in my evaluations.
As you can imagine, after 11 years of doing this work, there’s a long list to choose from. Here are five more players I was either too high or too low on.
Try not to enjoy it too much.
My final ranking: No. 5
When I look back at where I was at on Slafkovsky pre-draft and actually read over my report, I think it 1) had the player from a makeup/skills perspective accurately scouted and depicted and 2) was quite measured in its analysis and projection.
This was the report, in full:
“Slafkovsky is one of the draft’s most tantalizing prospects, with a skill-size combo that scouts and coaches clamour for and he has already demonstrated against pro competition domestically and, more notably, internationally. It has been a big year for him. Nine points in five games and a historic silver medal for the Slovaks at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup. An Olympic bronze medal as the tournament’s MVP. A Liiga silver medal with his club team, TPS. A team-leading nine points at the men’s worlds.
Slafkovsky is built like a power forward, with a 218-pound frame that makes him one of the draft’s heaviest players, but he plays the game with uncharacteristic finesse, regularly flashing hands you’d expect out of a smaller player one-on-one to pull pucks in tight to his feet. He’s also got a rangy, fluid stride, which makes him a surprisingly dangerous rush player — and impressive confidence with the puck on his stick, which enables him to hang onto it (sometimes to a fault) and attack off the wall into the slot (he loves taking the puck from the half-wall to the home-plate area to shoot from his forehand. The team that drafts him will be betting on his upside, which grades at or near the very top of this class.
I’m also a big fan of his approach. He has continued to play his style and look to attack in control (a lot of forwards his size become more deferential and fall back into give-and-go habits to fit a mold when they make the jump to the pro level) as he has played against higher and higher competition. There is, despite his makeup and success, some risk associated with his projection at his size (small players aren’t the only ones who carry size-based limitations with them!) though, and that, combined with how much I like the four players I have slotted ahead of him here, does leave me a little lower on him than where he’ll be picked, even if there’s a real chance he becomes one of the two or three best players out of this draft.”
You don’t rank a player in the top five and in the top tier of a draft class (I had players 1-5 all in the same grouping) if you don’t see serious upside.
When I look back at the four players I had ranked ahead of him, I can live with ranking Logan Cooley, Shane Wright and Simon Nemec ahead of him, too. Even with the benefit of hindsight, I think my process of slotting those players in front of Slafkovsky was sound, so I’m not going to lose too much sleep over it. But it’s Matt Savoie at No. 4 on my 2022 list that I missed on. I really liked what I’d seen of Savoie in the AJHL, USHL (all-rookie team during the pandemic season) and then WHL (41 goals and 102 points in 75 combined regular-season and playoff games as the leading scorer on a Winnipeg Ice team that featured Connor McClennon, Conor Geekie, Mikey Milne, Zach Benson and company). He was one of the best skaters in the draft. He was a driver with his work ethic. He made plays off the rush and inside the offensive zone. I think I underestimated the role his 5-foot-9ish frame would play in his ability to progress beyond the level he was already at as a player, though — and to stick as a center in the NHL. I’d spoken with folks in Sherwood Park, Dubuque and Winnipeg about him and knew he was a standout athlete and strong kid for his size and I gave that too much weight (pun intended). It should have been a top-four tier, not a top-five.
I do wonder if I should consider draft range and post-draft priority in my projections more than I have in the past, too. When I released my final list, I knew Savoie was going to get picked closer to 10 and that Slafkovsky was in the mix for Montreal at No. 1. I knew, as a result, that Slafkovsky was going to be given every opportunity to succeed, and to play with good players, and to find his game, which is exactly what Montreal (wisely) did with him last year. I’ve tried to steer clear of considering those things in my evaluations and rankings, preferring to focus strictly on the player and what I see in them. But that post-draft context does play a role and I should probably account for it more.
Cutter Gauthier skating in his first career NHL game on April 18, 2024. (Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
My final ranking: No. 18
Gauthier was a complex evaluation for a number of reasons. First, everyone grappled — and many still are — with whether he was a center or a winger (I settled on winger and probably over-accounted for that). Second, he played on a line with two top players in Cooley and Jimmy Snuggerud, which always makes the process a little trickier because you have to separate fact from fiction and there have been a lot of players. Scouts faced a similar (and even more pronounced) predicament with the 2001 age group of forwards trying to tease out which of Jack Hughes, Cole Caufield, Trevor Zegras, Matt Boldy, Alex Turcotte and company were their own talent and which were bigger benefactors of the talent around them. In both cases, it turns out all of them were just top prospects on their own merits (maybe Turcotte a little less so in hindsight, but injuries have played a role there as well). Third, he didn’t have a great statistical profile despite playing on the NTDP’s first line (which in hindsight was also partly because Frank Nazar and Isaac Howard were sheltered offensively and stole some opportunities from them). Fourth, Gauthier played his best hockey in the home stretch, making a second-half push from the teens and 20s to the No. 5 pick. That fourth point (not adjusting fast enough on risers in a class) has been a common issue I’ve run into and one I’m now much more cognizant of.
And then there’s the player, whose profile again I think I had right. I liked his pro frame, his skating and obviously his shot (which I gave the second-best grade in the draft in my class superlatives). I knew he looked like a pro and that his athletic tools and scoring would translate. I wrote that I understood the top 10 merits. But I didn’t think he was a natural playmaker and thought he lacked the cerebral qualities to warrant going No. 5 and in hindsight, after the big four I talked about above were gone, he did kind of belong right there at No. 5. Minor missteps in my process at each of the four points highlighted above led me to slot him a tier lower than where he belonged. I think I probably got in my head about him not having that point-per-game upside you want in a top-five pick, too, and should have done a better job recognizing that in a weak draft (which 2022 was), the 30-30-60 player with size, even if that player is a winger, is a top-five candidate.
LW Sasha Pastujov (Anaheim Ducks — No. 66, 2021)
My final ranking: No. 14
To the point I made about considering the way Slafkovsky was perceived by others and the role that and his projected draft range were going to play in his development opportunities, I do wonder if I also should start thinking more about the other end of the spectrum when there is such a consensus view about a player that it takes on a life of its own and can completely drive the conversation about what they need to work on/prove. Because I wasn’t oblivious to the way people perceived Pastujov. I started his report with “I think Pastujov’s a little misunderstood” and highlighted that “scouts see mediocre acceleration and top speed and worry about his ceiling.” And while I believed then and believe now that Pastujov is a better skater than he was given credit for, and think it’s essential that I trust my evaluations, I also think there’s probably some truth to the fact that if you have to start a report arguing for a player as misunderstood that you should also question whether you’re in the minority for a reason.
I liked the craft, smarts, finesse, playmaking, puck skills and statistical profile, but I think I overemphasized those things and underemphasized the lack of pace he played with. I also knew he wasn’t going to be picked in the middle of the first round where I had him slotted and should have probably course-corrected my projection to the likelihood that he would be drafted and developed as a second- or third-round pick because of how so many had made up their minds on his profile.
And though I think he has progressed well given where he was drafted (led a low-scoring Guelph team in scoring post-draft, played well at the world juniors in a limited role, finished his junior career with 47 goals and 117 points in 76 combined regular-season and playoff games, had half a point per game as an AHL rookie last year), he hasn’t progressed like a No. 14 pick, so I didn’t just misread how he was going to be treated but also obviously the upside of the player.
Anttoni Honka takes possession of the puck during a preseason game between the Lightning and Hurricanes in September 2022. (Katherine Gawlik / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
My final ranking: No. 20
There are similar themes at play in my draft-year evaluation of Honka to that of Pastujov (guys just didn’t like him and thought his feet and defense weren’t up to snuff relative to his offense), but there’s also the added layer of the league shifting away from players who look like him. There are really only two roles for 5-foot-11 offensive D: the PP1 star and the third-pairing/PP2 guy. And it is getting harder and harder, if you don’t have length or real defensive value, to win that second role. As a result, players of Honka’s type, especially when they don’t have dynamic feet, have struggled as a trend in recent years to live up to what they were pre-drafted or the cachet they had as players within their age groups/national teams.
Aron Kiviharju was just a fourth-round pick. Ville Heinola still hasn’t held a top-six role with Winnipeg. Victor Soderstrom, who was taken at No. 11 by the Arizona Coyotes and has better feet than those others, still hasn’t established himself as a full-time NHLer. The Minnesota Wild couldn’t find a fit for Calen Addison. Erik Brannstrom and Adam Boqvist, both high picks, just switched teams (though I do think it’s notable that two smart front offices in Colorado and Florida made the bets). There are others who’ve figured it out: Rasmus Sandin, Henri Jokiharju, Jordan Spence, etc. But you’re better off not using first-round picks/ratings on that player type unless you’re absolutely sure about them. Honka had plenty of question marks.
C/LW Samu Salminen (New Jersey Devils — No. 68, 2021)
My final ranking: No. 29
Oddly enough, Salminen’s a player type that I haven’t usually been drawn to in the past. Three seasons later, his development has completely hit a wall and he’s now transferring from UConn after two seasons as a middle-six contributor there (he was sixth on the team in points per game as a freshman with 17 in 27 and fifth on a weaker team in scoring as a sophomore with 17 in 35) to Denver.
There is a lot that has gone into that and into me getting the ranking wrong. I wonder, for example, if I just happened to catch him at his best in my viewings in his draft year. He was the captain of the Finnish U18 team and a standout at worlds, centering the top line and scoring seven goals in seven games (as well as nine points). He torched the U20 level domestically in Finland and I was told at the time that had he not been committed to college he would have played some pro games in his draft year. He had size and scoring, was excellent in the faceoff circle and could be trusted defensively. But then he had to go back to Jokerit for his post-draft season (in part due to the pandemic) instead of straight into college, he still couldn’t play pro because of his NCAA plans, and his development suffered and has never really recovered. He also didn’t have the skating/pace piece and as with Pastujov and Honka, I don’t think I properly accounted for that. I won’t be surprised if he takes a step at Denver but he doesn’t look anything like a late-first-rated prospect.
Previous editions:
(Top photos of Juraj Slafkovsky and Cutter Gauthier: Minas Panagiotakis / Getty Images and David Becker / AP Photo)
