We left off last week with Pavel Gogolev at 20th, who everyone in the official vote all ranked  in a very tight range, and as we’ll see, so did you. We can agree! We quickly move back into players where someone left them off the list.

Official Vote Summary - Week Two

20 - Pontus Holmberg

Weighted average: 20.0

2021 Top 25 Under 25: Pontus Holmberg jumps to #20

Nine of ten voters thought Holmberg deserved to be in the top 25 this year, and he also lands dead on 20 in the average vote, putting him very nearly tied with Gogolev.

19 - Denis Malgin

Weighted average: 19.7

2021 Top 25 Under 25: Denis Malgin is #19

Not everyone voted for Malgin either, and the question in all our minds is: Is he really a tweener or just a tweener on a team coached by Sheldon Keefe?

18 - Ty Voit

Weighted average: 17.5

2021 Top 25 Under 25: Ty Voit is #18

Everyone voted for Voit, but that’s where the agreement ends. He has the widest spread in votes of a unanimous choice this year, with 14 ranking positions between his high of 11 and his low of 25. One other player comes close to that spread, and he and Voit have something crucial in common. I’m sure you can guess what that is.

17 - Veeti Miettinen

Weighted average: 17.3

2021 Top 25 Under 25: Veeti Miettinen is #17

Voit marked a jump in the rankings from the four players all clustered around 20, to the start of a big group. Including him and Miettinen, who is nearly tied with Voit.  There are seven players whose average is between 14 and 18. They’ll run through almost all of next week, and then we’ll see a big change on Friday.

16 - Dmitri Ovchinnikov

Weighted average: 16.5

2021 Top 25 Under 25: Dmitri Ovchinnikov is #16

It’s fitting these three “good in junior” later-round picks all ended up together on the list, although we didn’t all put them there unanimously. They all had big spreads in rank, but all three of them did get 10 votes each, which won’t be true for someone revealed next week.

Community Vote

We left off week one with a player on the community vote that the official voters didn’t rank. We begin the week with the one player we agree on most.

20 - Pavel Gogolev

Weighted average: 19.59

The official vote also had him very close to a rank of 20.

19 - Mac Hollowell

Weighted average: 19.34

One of the many players you all ranked very close to 20, the official vote did not rank him.

18 - Pontus Holmberg

Weighted average: 19.14

Another area of close agreement is everyone’s ranking of Holmberg. That ELC and playoff success made us take another look, but no one is very convinced.

17 - Mikko Kokkonen

Weighted average: 19.04

The official list hasn’t gotten to Kokkonen yet, and this ranking on the Community Vote marks a divergence of opinion on this player who made a fairly seamless transition to the AHL for a short stretch last year.

16 - Nicholas Abruzzese

Weighted average: 17.51

Abruzzese marks your jump up in average ranking out of the 20 range in exactly the same way Voit did on the official list. Interesting to compare these two players — that the official vote had higher in both cases — for all the things they have in common.

Next week the Community Vote catches up on three players already ranked much lower on the official vote, and the official list contains two names on this segment of the community vote. We don’t so much disagree on this middle section as have a very large clump of players in a different order. There are six players on the Community vote between rank 14 and 18 to the official list’s seven. This is the section of the ranking where order means very little, which traditionally means it gets argued about the most.

Top 25 Under 25