Prospects Tournament Riff Raff
Anything we need to glean from the kids' trip to St. Paul?
The most satisfying part of any of these prospects tournaments that take place in September is the same as it is for the first NFL preseason game. Basically, you just want to see the jerseys back on the ice to reassure you of what time of year it is. It's just a natural rhythm type thing. Other than that, generally, the first-round picks look a cut above, because they're first-round picks. Some player who is fast and fast only stands out. And if you're Oliver Moore, it's both. Let's get through it.
-It's not that Sam Rinzel wasn't a totally different class than most everyone on the ice in his one game in St. Paul, because he was. But he should be. Not only is he a first-round pick, or have a handful of NHL games, but he spent two seasons at a top-level NCAA program. Most of these jamokes on the ice are on second and third-lines in the CHL or USHL or California Penal League or wherever else. The pedigree for Rinzel is just totally different.
I don't know that I can physically go through another tangent about Rinzel's eight NHL games really not meaning much, but headlines like this just cause me to need leeches and blood-letting.
#1? Seriously? It's eight games at the end of the season! We can't stress enough just how meaningless these games are. In the rankings of all things meaningless, it's like:
#1 Life itself
#2 The end of the NHL season
Can we pump the brakes at all on this? Let's see what he looks like against a fully-charged Panthers forecheck on opening night before giving him his own wing of Fifth-Third.
-Which leads to my second point out of the tournament. If Rinzel is waltzing into a top-pairing role after just eight games, and yet Artyom Levshunov has to scrap to even make the NHL team out of camp, then either the Hawks completely blew their #2 pick in 2024, or they have no idea how to evaluate their draft picks both before and after they make them.
What I will say is that it probably isn't easy to play with Levshunov. The strength of his game are his instincts, anticipation, aggressiveness, and speed with which he employs all of it. He's going to make decisions that other d-men don't make, because he can pull them off. Some kid who will never sniff the NHL is not equipped to balance that. He's barely equipped to not pass out watching Levshunov. So Levshunov had a rocky start on Saturday, doing the things he should do but having his partner trying to ape him because he didn't know what else to do, leaving some grizzly open patches on the ice.
But Alex Vlasic should be equipped. Wyatt Kaiser should be. Having Levshunov waste one more second in Rockford would be criminal management of the team's second-most important prospect. If Rinzel has already replaced Levshunov as the prospective top-pairing player for the next decade, then put Levshunov in the Kaprizov trade package already.
Of course, the most likely outcome is that Jeff Blashill spends most of the season trying to neuter everything about Levshunov's game that makes him special in the name of "solid," and the Hawks enforce the Rinzel-Levshunov hierarchy accidentally. While also capping Levshunov's potential and value.
-Oh, is that all?
Ben Pope
Moore and A.J. Spellacy fall into the same space, though probably at different levels. It's easiest for everyone to notice a player who is faster than everyone. Especially at this level, where speed alone can force opponents into mistakes and turnovers because most of the opponents still have bad acne and can't read.
Moore has had only limited cracks at anything above the NCAA-level, and has looked decidedly pedestrian in them. He wasn't a factor on two WJC teams, and if Rinzel's eight-game, late-season cameo suddenly means he's Bobby Coffey Makar, then Moore's must mean he's basically a third-liner at best. Which is fine, it's not a bad thing to have. But saying "If he can just learn to finish" is the same thing as when baseball observers say about a player, "Man if he could just hit like this every month." Yeah, well, the reason he can't is he's not that good. It's not a matter of luck.
Spellacy is just the junior version. He looks great in camp and these things because he's fast and big, and can scare other kids into fuck-ups or pros who are just trying to not get hurt into the same mistakes through inattention. But he's got three years of middling-to-nothing production in the OHL, and everyone fucking scores in OHL. Unless he just pops in the AHL or something, Spellacy is the Cleveland version of Tony Salmelainen.
-I would have hoped for more from Nick Lardis. Yes, he got a few chances, which is the important thing. But it's not like the goalies are going to get worse from here on out. Lardis's hope to make the team and be something is his ability to finish, at any level. ANYONE CAN JUST TAKE 'EM!
Forcing goalies into uncomfortable saves can be cool and force juicy rebounds, but right now that's Connor Bedard's job and no one thinks it's good enough. Lardis needs to score, and score a lot in camp.