Thomas Drance

If all they'd known was how players produced in their various major junior leagues, in their draft eligible season, age adjusted.

Wasn't it even just the CHL?

Right.

It was just the CHL.

Yeah.

And as I recall, the model outperformed like all but seven or eight teams.

Now, there's a power to like the real takeaway from this is not NHL teams suck at drafting.

Yeah.

The real takeaway from this is that the baseline that you need to hit in terms of like projectable professional tools, right?

For those to outweigh the signal generated by your production in hockey, like hockey is a fundamentally simple game and the best players in hockey tend to be the ones that produce the most.

And at lower levels of the game, the, the level that your projectable tools have to hit is,

in order to, yeah, outweigh the signal provided by this baseline is extraordinarily high, like way higher than most NHL teams and NHL, even amateur evaluators think it is.

And so the guy who's like the toolsy forward, who it's like, oh, but that'll play.

It won't.

Yeah, it won't.

And in fact, the super high scoring undersized guy is so much better at the actual sport of hockey.

that their lack of tools probably makes them a much better bet to be Alex Dabrinkit than the guy, you know, XYZ guy who's taller or faster or can do all these other things, but just fundamentally can't play the game in his island.

In his draft plus one, 67 and 61 in the dub, right?

My favorite example that I like to bring up is Paul Gostad.

Right.