Thanks to some help from community member Frédéric, we were able to find out exactly how the community feels about this year’s crop of Canadiens players that are under 25 years of age.
We went through the results, weeded out the incomplete forms, and ended up with over 120 ballots.
Without further ado, here’s the comparison between the results from the EOTP panelists, and the EOTP community vote. You’ll find their final ranking first, followed by the average ranking in parenthesis. Players with a blue background rose in the ranks, whereas players with a red background dropped.
The top seven players remained intact, followed by a shuffle in the 8-9-10 spots between Sven Andrighetto, Michael McCarron, and Jarred Tinordi.
The biggest jump was fairly predictable. Noah Juulsen’s position improved by five spots, but the difference in average rankings wasn’t as drastic (3.3). I tend to side with the community when it comes to Juulsen’s rank, yet interestingly the #1 response in the Juulsen article was that he deserved a top 10 spot in the rankings, whereas the actual votes told another story. Juulsen received roughly 35 votes for a top ten spot.
Brett Lernout made his way into the top 25, moving up a few spots from his near-miss in the EOTP rankings. Once again, I agree with the community rankings, in that Lernout probably deserved a top 25 ranking.
One of the biggest surprises for me was Zachary Fucale. I have a hard time understanding how his on-ice performance can justify an improved rank. Unlike the first two climbers, I strongly disagree with this jump. I assume name recognition had something to do with it.
A few surprising players found themselves with a lower ranking, most notably Sven Andrighetto and Daniel Audette, both of which enjoyed successful seasons with their respective clubs last year.
The bottom of the list saw more changes than the top 25, albeit less disparity in terms of average votes.
Mac Bennett made way for Brett Lernout, although he didn’t suffer a massive drop, falling only one spot.
All things considered, the average rankings were very similar, and despite one or two major discrepancies, there wasn’t much movement.
(A big thank you goes out to Frédéric for producing the two variation graphics posted above)
With that, we put an end to the Top 25 Under 25 series for one more year, and switch our focus to the upcoming NHL season. This was the first time in our blog’s history that Bruce Peter didn’t run the Top 25 Under 25 show, although he had a pretty good reason to abstain from voting this year: he was hired by the Toronto Maple Leafs.
I’d like to thank everyone that took the time to read the incredibly detailed profiles. Our writers worked very hard on them, and thankfully the response was overwhelmingly positive. If you missed any of the profiles, you can catch up by checking out the 2015 Top 25 Under 25 story stream.
Don’t forget to post your rankings in the comments below.
