Fourteen voters were asked to rank their top 25 Leafs prospects under the age of 25. There were 47 choices, with late addition Trevor Moore making it 48.
Demographics
The top ten includes two American, two Russians, one Finn, one Swede, one Slovak, and three Canadians.
The total list is broken down this way:
The average age of the top 10 is just over 21 and the average age of the top 25 is just under 21.
There are only three players aged 24 in the top ten, but one who is 18.
There are 17 forwards, and the rest are defenders, no goalies made the cut.
The Voting
There was a consensus in voting generally, but specifically at the top of the list, the consensus was rock solid. The number one pick was unanimous.
At the other end of the list, eight different players were chosen at 25, and only one of them, Rinat Valiev, was picked four times, the rest had only one or two people voting for them.
The top 16 were ranked somewhere in the top 25 by everyone. The top 21 were ranked by at least 13 voters.
The lowest number of votes for anyone who made the cut was for Martins Dzierkals who had eight.
There were 14 unranked players not selected by anyone, and of the nine unranked players that got at least one vote, only one had more than four: Adam Brooks with seven.
Let's look more closely at the top ten:
You can see the consensus at the top and how it starts to fray apart first a little, and then a lot. There is only one vote for second, third or fourth that is for someone other than those three finishers, a single vote for Nikita Zaitsev.
The next group shows a little less agreement in the voters. There is one vote for fifth through eighth that isn't for one of six people, a single vote for Morgan Rielly, but there are two "off the board" votes not shown here because they were for players that finished out of the top ten.
One through eight all have at least 13 voters behind them ranking them in the top 10. The consensus starts to unravel completely after that, so that while, as mentioned, the overall players included in the rest of the list are similar for each voter, the order is not.
At the top of the list, the spread between the best and the worst ranking for each player is very low until you hit Marincin with a difference of 10. Josh Leivo has a spread of 14 in his votes and one person didn't rank him at all, but Nikita Soshnikov, ranked in the top ten overall, but with a spread of 12 places in the votes might be the more contentious choice.
The spread tightens up again at the bottom from Carl Grundström at 23 down through those who didn't quite make the list. If people ranked them, they ranked them low. The one exception is Garret Sparks who has a spread of 10 rankings in his votes out of only four voters who ranked him.
Much like at any draft, once you get past the top few obvious choices, the number of weaknesses in each player mounts, and between those different missing pieces of a complete package is where the biggest amount of difference of opinion lies.
