Canucks Army Midterm Prospect Rankings: Reader Poll Results

We’ve counted down our picks for the Vancouver Canuck’s top 20 prospects, from Michael Carcone to Brock Boeser. Before I reveal the individual lists and drop a final summary of the rankings, I thought you might be interested to see how the reader poll results turned out.

So today, we’ll check out where our readers, and other internet respondents, ranked the Canucks prospects, as well as how you answered other questions pertaining to the Canucks prospect pool.

A total of 442 people responded to the poll, which is excellent. We’ll get right into the meat of it: here’s the entirety of the Canucks’ eligible prospect pool, as ranked by you, the readers:

These bars represent an inverse of the average ranking each prospect received (similar to a points system). It’s an easy way of looking at the tiers of Canucks prospects. Brock Boeser, Thatcher Demko, and Olli Juolevi are thought of as one tier, while Jordan Subban, Adam Gaudette, Guillaume Brisebois, Will Lockwood and Andrey Pedan make up another.

This next very nice graph, which someone has deemed “a watermelon graph”, shows how many votes each prospect got in each position, nicely coloured to show heavy concentrations of votes. The dark green boxes show how tight some areas of voting were – for instance, 1-3, 4-8, and 25-28.

One thing that you’ll notice: yes, some people took this survey less seriously than others, as with all surveys. If this were an actual study, I’d vet the responses, but seeing as this is for a blog article, I left them in. Consequently, we do have Ludwig Blomstrand getting one first place vote, and Brock Boeser getting one 18th place vote. Someone Adam Gaudette receives multiple votes for both first place and dead last. That’s impressive.

Since I was already putting a survey together, I figured I’d through in a few extra questions about how you guys perceive the Canucks’ prospect pool as a whole, and in comparison to those of the rest of the NHL.

The first question refers to the latter topic.

There are a few hockey outlets each year that attempt to rank each team by its prospect pool, like the Hockey News or the now defunct Hockey’s Future. In recent years, most have placed the Canucks in the middle third of the league.

You felt pretty similar, with a lean towards the back half of the middle third. The 16th to 20th region garnered the most votes, with the 11th to 15th and 21st to 25th bins following close behind. More people felt that the Canucks have one of the worst prospect pools in the league than one of the best.

The next question was in regards to the strength of the pool as a whole:

Four-to-six ran away with this one and that’s a pretty fair guess. We’d all like to think that the top three are locks, and then hope to get a couple more on top of that. Maybe a Gaudette, maybe a Brisebois, maybe a Lockwood. A few of those would be nice.

To the people that voted for “More than 10”: I’ll have whatever you’re having.

The final question I asked had less to do with the prospect pool (directly, at least) and more to do with the job that the current management group has done, and the general current state of the franchise.

It’s no surprise than “Now” didn’t receive a single vote. I mean, we’re watching those game right? It’s pretty telling that “Within Five Years” got about four times as many votes as “Within Three Years”, as did “Not in the Foreseeable Future”. Only a few people voted for “Never”, so the vat majority haven’t had their spirits completely broken yet.

The results of this poll suggest that the Canucks are doing some things right.. they’ve managed to get a hold of a few prospects that should fill their lineup in the new near future. Unfortunately, not a lot of fans are confident that the Canucks’ have a pool that would be considered in top third of the league – many don’t see it in the top half.

As for their competitiveness in the future, which is a combination of the prospect pool and a number of other factors, there doesn’t seem to be much confidence there either.

Now that we’ve revealed what you guys and gals think of the Canucks prospect pool, there’s only one thing left to do – reveal the individual lists our staff put together, and put a bow on this thing. You can expect that in the next day or two.

Thanks for voting!