Welcome to the inaugural article of the Blueshirts Breakaway 2020 NHL draft coverage! All season long, you’ll get prospect rankings and analysis from our draft analysts Drew Way, George Obremski, Rich Coyle and Shawn Taggart. The plan is to provide you all with prospect analysis in a variety of forms, including periods rankings, trend tracking where we note how players have moved in our rankings, Q&As, debates where our analysts argue over our differing views on the draft prospects and on-off articles where an individual analyst dives deep on a particular topic.
We decided to kick off our coverage with a data dump. Below, you will find the individual top-31 rankings of each of our analysts, as well as an aggregated ranking that averages the individual lists of each analyst. All of our analysts are actively maintaining their own rankings on an ongoing basis that go far deeper than the 31 we published today. Both the aggregate and individual lists rank players 1 through 31, and sort them into tiers which group players together that the analyst feels are of a similar overall ability level.
Drew explains his methodology on tiers as the following: “To me, the tiers are far more important than the individual rankings. In essence, if I have a group of players on the same tier, that means that if I’m a GM drafting, then I deem this group of players as all about equal in terms of their overall ability and potential to become an impact NHL player. I’m a massive advocate of always drafting the best overall player, but, if I have a handful of players left on the same tier I am deciding between, this is where things like positional need come into play.”
We wanted to get you our rankings by the kickoff of the season, hence treating this first article as a data dump containing a variety of rankings. From here, we plan to add a lot more context to these rankings in the coming weeks. Drew will be publishing an article at some point in the next few weeks discussing his early contenders for everyone’s favorite fake prospect award, the Ty Smith Memorial Trophy, which is awarded to the player that Drew feels is being most underrated by traditional draft pundits, and whom he will badger everyone about on Twitter all year long (and likely longer). If you have any questions or feedback about these rankings, or if you have any ideas for draft coverage you’d like to see this year, please don’t hesitate to drop us a comment or reach out to any of us directly on email. Thanks, and enjoy!
Aggregate Rankings
Drew Way Rankings
George Obremski Rankings
Rich Coyle Rankings
Shawn Taggart Rankings
