Putting a Bow on the 2014 Edition of the Prospect Series: Our Individual Rankings

In the past month to the day, we have published 20 articles – spanning nearly 40,000 words by our writers and another 406 additional reader comments –  which collectively aimed to count down towards what we deemed to be the best prospect in the Vancouver Canucks system. 

Those numbers doesn’t include this post, which will hopefully put a neat bow on the series as a whole by providing the individual rankings of everyone that had a say in the consensus. That, and a few other notes on what has morphed into a whale of a project over the years just past the jump.

As you’ll note below, the committee that partook in the project this summer featured a few different voices than the one that now-infamously anointed Brendan Gaunce with the top spot:

There are a few housekeeping notes that we should get to:

There has been some deserved angst in the comments sections throughout regarding the criteria for what does and doesn’t constitute a “prospect” by our estimations. The plan was to crack down with a stingier cutoff this go-around, setting it to include only players under the age of 24 by the time we had started collecting the votes earlier in the summer. 

In hindsight, it was probably a miscalculated decision on our part. Particularly in the case of someone such as Joacim Eriksson, who readers have been clamouring for a profile of. We’ll amend this for feature renditions of this series, shifting to a criteria that simply includes every player that’s still Calder-eligible at the time (that being fewer than 25 games in any single preceding season and under 26 years old by September 15th of that coming year). The one silver lining here for now is that there quite frankly isn’t much we could’ve added to Josh’s all-encapsulating review of Eriksson’s ’13-’14 campaign in Utica, anyways.

The other common question has had to do with Linden Vey, who also didn’t appear in the rankings. His exclusion was far more premeditated; with the Canucks having to expose Vey to waiVeyvers should they wish to send him down to the AHL at any point, it’s essentially a guarantee that he’ll start the upcoming season with the big club. As a result, we decided early on to postpone his write-up for an extensive position-by-position lineup preview we’ll be running as we move closer to the start of the season.

Beyond that, it should be pretty straightforward. Everyone compiled their own Top 20, which we added up and sorted based on aggregate score. There was only one tie this year, with Jared McCann edging out Brendan Gaunce for the 6th spot by appearing higher on 4 of the 6 individual lists. 

As you can gleen from the chart above, I’d say we were collectively on the same page in a lot of regards. Obviously not everywhere though, as could’ve been expected. After all, as calculated and thoughtful an approach as we all respectively took, when it comes down to it it’s still a thoroughly subjective procedure. Certain people will be higher on certain players because of how they proportion their expectations and values; perceived upside, risk, place on the developmental curve, and positional factors are all examples of things that needed to be weighed against one another when evaluating something as fluid as prospects ultimately are.

Disagreement and thoughtful discussion are a byproduct, and that’s a great thing. Hopefully you not only got something out of this series, but were also able to use it as at least a passably entertaining bridge during the doldrums of the summer. 

Thanks for indulging us and following along!