Writing the prospect rankings every year is a daunting task. It’s incredibly difficult to look at a player’s body of work from a previous season and extrapolate that to what an entire theoretical hockey career might look like. Making sense of available evidence (data, video, etc.) is itself hardly a slam dunk, and then there are the variables that are hidden to an outsider like me or, in certain cases, even the team itself; injuries, team systems issues, mental state, possible growth spurts, and so on.
The pandemic’s derailing of the hockey calendar further complicates matters. Would I have liked to have seen Morgan Barron play against college hockey’s best in do-or-die games in April?