Top 25 Under 25: Meet the Voters

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Cathy: I started voting in the T25 years ago, and now the site manager of PPP forces me to do it every year. I have learned a lot about prospects over the years, and I'm surprised every year to learn new lessons about this amazing pastime – guessing about the future of teenagers. I've become a lot more willing to be radical in my votes in the last few years. I've stuck with the theory that I'm ranking players based on their inherent most probable potential future value, not just if they will make the Leafs. I don't care about points.

Sclodiggity: Long time reader, first time voter. Like many long-time Leafs fans, I took a strong interest in prospects and the value of draft picks and ELCs while the Leafs were icing medium team after medium team in the 2000s and 2010s. When it comes to the “value” of prospects, I’m a believer in the scarcity of high end talent. That is to say, high ceilings are more valuable than high floors. I don’t have an official background in scouting or media (I’m actually a marine biologist which people always find fun and a strong background in statistics and data analytics may be more useful here than a “good eye for talent”).

Shinson93: I found PPP maybe a decade ago, but wasn’t really following it, just using it as a reference to find more “insider” info especially about potential prospects in the system. I finally joined the voting in 2019 and found it really challenged my understanding of value in the game; what I value as a fan and what value(s) the players provide. This started my journey of learning the “language” of prospects/scouting/skill assessment, so I could understand something more than “feels”. Shoutout to Brian for sharing his journey and helping me build my own foundation. This year I finally felt confident enough to throw my hat in the ring and expose myself to being judged by others. My method probably falls somewhere in the middle of science and art. Stats provide a lot of information, but I don’t believe they provide a singular truth. I find joy and beauty in the sharing of ideas more than in being “right”.

Adam: I have been here way too long. I have voted in more of these than I have elections, and I always vote, but I think I've made more winning choices here (I will take my victory lap in excluding Brendan Leipsic from the T25, thank you). I used to be heavy into prospects but then COVID kept me from games and then my stupid local OHL team kept tripping over their own feet [editor's note: he doesn't really mean feet] and I kinda lost interest in that part of hockey. So if you love guesswork, I'm your guy

dhammm: This is my third go as a Top 25 Under 25 Guest Voter. I am a long time PPP reader and sometime commenter. I'm a subscriber and you should be too!!!!

I am a prospect sicko and have been for almost as long as I've been a hockey fan. I put a lot of stock in quantitative methods of prospect analysis. I do not trust my eyes because I only have limited viewings of any prospect, and I like being able to put a prospect’s numbers in context. So NHLe and prospect cohort success inform my rankings as much as my eyes and general vibes on a player, my sense of where a given prospect is at and where I think they'll be in the future. I value scoring as a proxy for other properties like overall skill and the coach's trust, but I understand that this data is messy and that more scoring, even when normalized across leagues, does not always mean a prospect is better than another, nor does it necessarily forecast what kind of player a given prospect will be.

I also like to read, watch movies, and take long walks on the beach.

Zone Entry (Editrix, writeuse, and boardgamestress based in Etobicoke, she/her): I’ve been a Leafs fan since I was little, started remembering player names around the Damphousse/Iafrate era, but it wasn’t until I found PPP that I started to really appreciate the finer points of the game, and gain a sense of our prospect pool (which pretty quickly becomes DEADpool this year, amirite, har har? But seriously, yay She-Hulk). This is my second time as a guest voter because I love when data gets crunched, and since $ is supertight lately at least this way I can contribute some of my time, as a way of giving back to a community that’s been amazingly nice to me. :-)

Last year I got super-mathematical with my voting but this year I’m going with more of a gut sense of “how painful would it be to lose prospect X?” and we’ll see how that translates. One caveat is that my #25 will have to once again be Joe Miller, because im wa tugut prospect demang wowk hard unte fights fo da belte. Yam seng!

Cameron. S: I (Cameron Squires) am a lifelong Toronto Maple Leafs fan from NL, Canada currently studying Computer Science in university! (Kaberle was my first ever favourite player when I was a kid, so I’m still pretty young lol). I have been reading PPP for a few years now, with the T25U25 always being my favourite time of year. This will be the first time I am a voter! I have always been really interested in Leafs prospects, getting really invested in mock drafts and watching a lot of junior teams to see our prospects develop whenever I’m not studying for my university courses. For voting, I tried to rank all the prospects in different ways: ceilings, floors, what they’ve accomplished currently, and finally my overall impressions based on them after watching them. I also lately realized I value late round picks more than most people online.

brysplace: I’m the designated Leaf Fan in my family (there always has to be at least one when children are formulating). Felix the Cat, Doug Gilmour, Wendel Clark, Dave Andreychuk were my Leaf Heroes as a kid. I’ve been hanging around PPP since the Teacher Overlord days. Thanks to all of you who bought Leaf tickets or merch and funded my future retirement!

I won the Cup with Reimer in net and Kessel on the wing in GM mode of EA NHL a few iterations ago (PS 3), then won it again a few seasons later after trading Kessel for a young Jamie Benn (he didn’t even have a portrait in the game yet) and getting M-A Fleury in net. I don’t sim games. I watch every single one of them during the season and playoffs to get a feel of team chemistry and what narratives come about (it's really all just a bunch of 1s and 0s, but let me have my pretend NHL-on-a-disk, ok?). I DID reload once, in Game 7 of the Finals when some forward made a ridiculous pass-back to Reimer from the offensive zone in OT, and he let it in (channeling his inner Vesa I guess?). I feel my GM play-style choices make me equivalent to a real world GM, so I’m really just waiting for the Leaf’s real-world ones to start emulating my brilliance.

I figured speaking up about my prospect choices and having people lament/ridicule them publicly in the comments is another way to pretend to be a real Leafs GM. Sounds fun!

Also, my PS3 finally broke on me. Sad face.

Hound Line: I've been a PPP lurker since the Thunder Dome and a draft & prospect-nik in all sports (even those I hardly watch) since the early aughts. When Cathey put out the call to vote in the official T25U25 I had to answer and get my uninformed opinions out there.

As far as my criteria for prospects ranking, I won't be re-inventing the wheel, just trying to balance the information I have on the prospects: production, analytics & eye-test; to get as complete a picture as I can on their respective ceilings & floors and figure out how much positive impact they're likely to have on the Leafs winning games.

Hardev: you might be shocked to find out I’ve been writing about Leafs prospects at PPP for almost 10 years! In that time, I’ve gotten two degrees, became a high school teacher, and got married! While with PPP, I’ve spent a lot of time closely watching and tracking the careers of dozens AHL prospects and OHL prospects. I hope the experience of seeing the results of players who I thought were great or terrible when they were young has enforced who I believe can be successful pros and who peak at various levels below. One thing I do know, that one player who only has one “NHL calibre” skill isn’t making it unless they diversify their abilities. One thing I admit I don’t have a lot of experience in is in potential stars. I don’t know where Cowan or Minten will end up like I didn’t know the potential of Knies. I’m excited to watch and learn!

Brigstew: Last year I said: “I always enjoy doing these”, but also added “but I hate rankings”. Both those statements are still true. The actual rankings part of it, specifically making my rankings, I have enjoyed less and less each year. Not because the player pool to vote on has become weaker, I’ve just sort of realized that I could roll a dice to determine my rankings completely randomly and it would have as much meaning – to me, at least. What is still true about that statement is that I do enjoy reading, writing and talking about each article in the series. That’s what matters to me.

My method in making my rankings, as always, took me about 5 minutes. I go through each player and set a tier number for each one. Then I re-sort the list and make some adjustments to a few players to move them up/down a tier. Then I sort each tier according to ‘rank’, and once that’s all done I number the whole list 1 through 25. I do make some tweaks at the end. Honestly, outside of the top… 7-10 players that I ranked, every player I ranked after was basically done based on my personal vibes with them.

Species: I’ve been hanging around this kitten ranch for over ten years now, and I’ve seen many prospects come and go. Some too fast. Some not fast enough. Occasionally, some of the Marlies stay and talk with me after a hard long game and I get to know them a little better. I rank mostly on the balance of a future NHL potential ceiling, which has a lot of variance in it from the mean outcome, so some players I rank higher at the start of their time on the list will then slowly drift down when there’s more seasons of data even though they might be as good as they were all along. This year was a challenge as the potential future ceilings got pretty low, pretty fast, and at the end of the list there were some guesses based only on stats.

Catch-67: I’ve been a commenter at PPP for almost 10 years, and I chipped in a few articles last year too. This is my second time voting on T25U25. My strategy with voting this year was generally to give each player a tier and then use that to figure out specific rankings, but I found in the end that my final ranking changed quite a bit from the tier. Given how weak this year’s list is, the latter part of the list was difficult to be confident in, and it was interesting balancing players who seem quite competent but who I’m confident won’t make the Leafs versus players who are just big maybes — but who are almost certainly never going to be as good as the last guy.

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