Top 25 Under 25 History - Part II

In Part I, the ancient origins of the T25 and the dusty historical records were revealed. This time, it's all sleek, modern and a little bit Scandinavian.

2016-2018

The Auston Matthews years begin, and the questions about who should be number one are replaced by the interminable fight for second place. Only age will defeat Matthews as he is the unanimous first every year.

*denotes a tie

2016 started out with the same structure as the voting from years past, and this is the first year I wrote articles or voted. 2017 was a crossover year. I was site manager, but I didn't yet run the T25. I'm not sure about the tabulation method for 2016, but for 2017, it was one that heavily weighted the no votes so that the difference between ranking a player at 25th and not ranking them was extreme. The reverse tabulation method had been lost to collective amnesia. In 2018, I took control of the spreadsheets, and used a simple unreversed tabulation that treated all unranked votes as zeros.

In 2017, we had a tie for 25th place, and we just decided to not break it. When Mitch Marner and William Nylander tied for real in 2018 after coming close in 2017, we decided to call them co-second-place holders and there was no third place. With the first place a lock, the Nylander vs Marner show was the dominating debate. And it pays to remember now that back then, it was radical to vote Nylander higher.

I used to fill in the vote sheet every year with both at 2.5. I always left it until the very last moment to choose. I don't think that take was wrong.

In 2016, the player drafted after Matthews was the still controversial Yegor Korshkov. He just made the list, a fairly common situation for players taken as late firsts or seconds. He climbed up a little, but KHL success never registers as success for the T25.

In 2017, Toronto drafted Timothy Liljegren, and he had a lot of pre-draft hype which likely helped him debut so high. Eemeli Räsänen made the list just as Korshkov had.

Josh Leivo, who was on the first list back in 2012, topped out at ninth in his final appearance. How this man, whose career highlight was an epic AHL season and playoff performance in Chicago, could ever have become an it-boy and poster child for the mean coach who won't play the good players still amazes. But that AHL season is a tantalizing look at what Leivo could do, but rarely actually did. I think his coaches experienced that unrealized potential rather differently to his fans.

In 2018, the Leafs had a lot of picks, and after the very surprisingly low placing of Rasmus Sandin, Sean Durzi and Semyon Der Arguchintsev all made the list. No sign of 156th overall Pontus Holmberg though. I think we can all forgive ourselves for not seeing that coming in his draft year. We should have believed a little more in both Sandin and Durzi, though.

2019-2020

The last normal summer led into the Pandemic seasons where I made a lot of people really angry.

2019 starts here:

Top 25 Under 25 - PPP Leafs (Page 9)

PPP LeafsBrian Stewart

A lot went on over these years, but to begin when it was all business as usual, 2019 is far enough back in time that we can laud ourselves for our prescience. There's two examples:

From me, a serious look at a player I had the luxury of knowing very well. This profile came before he had a sh% spike in the SHL and people misled themselves into thinking he was an offensive genius. Ranking Pontus Holmberg in 2019 was a radical act.

Pontus Holmberg: Unranked in the Top 25, but first in his coach’s heart

See how a visualization of his post-draft season in the SHL can tell us what kind of player Holmberg is.

PPP LeafsCathy Squires

And from Hardev, a controversial post that upset people (who only read the first sentence):

Top 25 Under 25: The Case Against Jeremy Bracco #12

Bracco is a good prospect but he has a long way to go.

PPP LeafsHardev

This seemingly harsh take on Bracco turns out to have been too easy on him. He should have been down in the doldrums of the list with Korshkov where he landed in 2020.

The shortened 2019-2020 season and long offseason caught us with nothing much to talk about while we worried about when or if life would return to normal. Doing a T25 in the 2020 summer interregnum after the season but before the draft was even announced was really about keeping ourselves together inside our own heads and as a group.

The summer 2020 list is where we started the reverse tabulation again. I don't recall who suggested it, but we were like Renaissance Europe relearning the math we didn't even know we'd forgotten. We all remembered the Reddit thread one year that accused our voting process of lacking integrity, but a better way to actually tabulate the votes? Nope, no one recalled that at all.

I stirred up a lot of emotion when I put the draft picks the Leafs had as eligibile for voting in the summer. I had two reasons, one was the simple fact that the top of the list had been carved deep into granite and there was nothing to say about that top three. The only debates were about Rasmus Sandin vs Timothy Liljegren vs Travis Dermott. With some Nick Robertson thrown in. That's great, but it wasn't really enough considering Toronto's shrinking prospect pool an our copious free time.

My other reason for including those picks was to see what arguments the group had about ranking an idea of a player who had no face or name or, crucially, point stats in junior hockey, as opposed to an actual individual. For all that some people really hated it, I found the discussions illuminating, and I got a lot out of listening to opposing views on that second-round pick. Remember that in the past, players taken with low firsts or seconds were usually ranked very low on the T25. And the pick made it to 10th. That's partly the weakness of the list as a whole, but it's also a change you can see over the full history of this event.

A player drafted 15th, say, has a wide distribution of possible outcomes, and the tendency in the early years was to extreme pessimism and a ranking near the bottom of the probability window. The first ranking of Morgan Rielly is even more pessimistic.

Maybe we just had too much time to talk about these things in 2020, or maybe it was Nick Robertson that changed some minds the year before, but we all started to realize that a just-drafted player was safe to assume as better than players not contributing meaningfully in the NHL. This was true of the community votes as well.

In 2019, the Leafs took Nick Robertson at 53rd with their best pick and he came in at 11th. In the first 2020 vote, the unused second rounder was 10th, and the two players the Leafs actually took in the late fall draft of 2020 (after a pick trade) came in at 11th and 12th.

I can't talk about 2020 without the most painful memories of the T25 coming to the fore. We had started to believe in our drafted prospects and ranked our fifteenth overall, Rodion Amirov, at six on the list. We believed in him, loved him, gave him our hearts. Well I did. I can't read his name without seeing this one move he used to make on the power play where he faded back and then drifted up. The geometry of the game playing in his mind clear to see. His name stops appearing on the list in 2021, but he never leaves. He is always ours.

2021-2023

Auston Matthews' reign ends and a new champion is named.

The posts start here:

Top 25 Under 25 - PPP Leafs (Page 5)

PPP LeafsHardev

The most recent three years are notable for the shortening length of the eligibility list, the gradual ageing out of the elite players and a return to a focus almost entirely on prospects – just not very good ones.

It's a more challenging environment to vote in, and uncertainty becomes the main topic of conversation. I don't think any player exemplifies that more than Joe Woll. Unranked in 2021, ranked at 23 in 2022 and fourth a year later, many people now consider him a lock as a Leafs' starter.

Maybe. I'm still uncertain. I never rated him very highly because I tend to be suspicious of goalies who are what I call positional puck stoppers. Curtis McElhinney, now the Leafs head of goalie development was not very good when something unexpected happened, but he seemed good at reading the play and holding his position as the puck hit him. Somewhere. Woll is even better at being in the right place at the right time. And it's this that leads to him looking so calm and comforting.

Looks and seems and no NHL games played makes it hard to effectively judge a forward, but when it's a goalie? Frankly I've considered that we should ban them from the list, but we have so few prospects already, that can't happen.

These lists show a little backsliding in the faith in just-drafted prospects. Matt Knies hits tenth and Fraser Minten only ninth. But it is absolutely remarkable that with Matthews and all the other top players gone, Easton Cowan only gets in at tenth. What exactly was at play there? Points plus disgruntlement about who wasn't taken. Contrast that to the excess of belief now in the mystical powers of Wes Clark now that he's gone.

Watch out, Ben Danford, you might be very underrated. The last few lists prompted a lot of discussion about defenders – mostly those that people were unhappy with, and that's about to increase dramatically after the draft we just had.

2024 is going to be a unique list in the history of this endeavor. The player with the most NHL games played has 87, and only one has ever played a full season as a rostered player. This is a prospect list now, something many people have demanded over the years. To them I say: be careful what you wish for, you might have to rank it.

I know who I'm ranking first this year, though. Just like every other year that's the easy part, and I was only wrong once.

The 2024 T25 will start sometime this month, with at least a week at the end of July for Official Voters to do their lists. Keep it in mind if you're interested in being an Official Voter and I'll ask for names soon.