Top 25 Under 25: How We Voted

The Top 25 Under 25 series has been a fairly intensive undertaking for us.  What started as eight separate panelists reviewing their own notes, reading reports and analyzing statistical information to compile their own lists ended up in 25 individual player profiles put together from a master list.  We didn’t really collectively debate each other over the merits of certain players, although in the comments sections for our profiles we’ve seen a few questions raised about certain rankings and the merits of players emerge.

With that in mind, we reveal all our individual Top 25 lists. Just a little about the final ranking: we eliminated both the highest or lowest rank of each player from consideration to weed out any potential biases. So since I was the only panelist to rank P.K. Subban ahead of Carey Price, my vote didn’t count for either of those players.

Brian La Rose of Habsworld is doing his site’s full Top 40 prospect rankings right now.  I encourage you to check it out.  Also, Hockey’s Future did their Top 20 list.  Each has different criteria.

Quick guide:  AB – Andrew Berkshire, CB – Chris Boyle, SC – Stephan Cooper, BLR – Brian La Rose (Habsworld), BP – Bruce Peter (me), RR – Robert Rice (Habs and Hockey), CT – Chris Topham (Lions in Winter), KVS – Kevin Van Steendelaar.

You can see from this list that we varied quite wildly past the first 22 prospects, while the rest of them came to a pretty strong consensus.  Beyond the Top 25, there are some names that we’re keeping an eye on, and I’ll actually bring that a bit more into focus on my next piece.  A couple of players from last year’s list, Maxim Trunev and Ian Schultz, fell off some of our radars (particuarly Schultz who struggled a lot in Hamilton).  A guy like Michael Blunden didn’t get much notice, even though he’s played a few dozen NHL games, as the panel is already looking at younger options.

If I’ve done this right, you should be able to click on the columns and sort out the individual lists.  I apologize if it has errors and will fix it up later.

Which panelist got it right (or the closest)?