We’ve been spending all week on the official vote, covering the players who received no votes, the ones with not enough votes, and the first two names on the Top 25. Now it’s time to turn out attention the the Community Vote.

If you voted in it this year, or the most recent years, you know the structure is a little different. While we can force our official voters to just pick 25 players and to rank them all with spots 1 through 25, the survey software is not sophisticated enough to force the community vote to be as cleanly done. It’s possible to rank one player or 44 or any number in between.

There were 314 responses this year, down from last year where there was a big resurgence of interest in hockey as the pandemic stopped being the only thing on our minds. It’s been obvious in many areas that hockey fans are now having a big resurgence in other summer activities while hockey and the Leafs are not capturing our attention as much. This is not a surprise in a lot of ways, but for Leafs prospects there is an obvious lack of elite talent and we’ve all noticed how much more difficult it is to decide between a large number of players that we don’t really expect to ever see in the NHL.

Three hundred responses is enough, however, to help wash out the noise introduced in the vote totals by incomplete vote submissions. Regular T25 fans will know that the Community Vote is less radical, and more likely to reveal the popular opinion about players.

Because of the vote structure, there are no literally unranked players, but out of 44 total choices, there are 19 who didn’t get enough votes to make the top 25, and that’s who we’re meeting today. The tabulation process for the Community Vote is very similar to what we use on the official votes. First place rankings are weighted at 25, down to 25th place which is weighted at one. Everything else is a zero, and that gives us the official order.  I then reverse the average back to a 1-25 scale to make it more intuitive to read.

The weighted average vote for the player you chose at 25th is 20.8, and a small number of unranked players have averages in the 21 to 24 range, but most are very close to 25, meaning they have almost no votes that counted.

The 19 who didn’t make the cut (in order from lowest ranked to closest to 25th) are:

  • John Fusco - Weighted Average of 24.83
  • Ryan O’Connell - 24.78
  • Wyatt Schingoethe - 24.78
  • Semyon Kizimov - 24.75
  • Nikolai Chebykin - 24.54
  • Vladislav Kara - 24.50
  • Nikita Grebyonkin - 24.49
  • Michael Koster - 24.45
  • Braeden Kressler - 24.34
  • Vyacheslav Peksa - 24.24
  • Kalle Loponen - 24.23
  • Joe Miller - 24.10
  • Brandon Lisowsky - 24.05
  • Max Ellis - 23.68
  • Axel Rindell - 23.54
  • Pavel Gogolev - 23.38
  • Artur Akhtyamov - 22.93
  • Veeti Miettinen - 22.63
  • Mac Hollowell - 21.82/

I would say everyone down to Rindell or Gogolev is a hard no, and the few remaining were not too far away from the 25th ranked player. As we’ll see next weekend, your 24th and 23rd are all very close to the vote for the 25th, but that’s a jump of more than one from 25th to 26th. This vote has a clearer line marking who was in and who wasn’t.

Next weekend, we’ll compare the first few ranked players on both the Community Vote and the Official Vote, and we will instantly see divergence. You obviously didn’t rank Brandon Lisowsky at 25, so we’ve barely begun and we’re already disagreeing.

The official list’s #23 will be announced on Monday.

Top 25 Under 25