Yesterday, we introduced the 2015 BSH Community Draft Board, as an attempt to try and put together a set of rankings for the top of this year’s draft as chosen by you, the people. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll go through and rank prospects all the way through the lottery by means of your votes.
We started this exercise off with the seven guys generally seen as the draft’s best non-McDavid and Eichel prospects, and with 45 percent of the vote, Erie center Dylan Strome takes the honor of being the first player voted onto the board.
Strome may be one of the highest-regarded forward prospects ever to not even be the top draft-eligible center on his own junior team, but that’ll happen when you spend the whole year playing behind the guy seen as the best prospect in a decade (Connor McDavid, of course). Still, Strome was outstanding all season long, scoring at a near-two-points-per-game clip and playing a huge role in Erie getting to the OHL finals.
At 6’3″ and 190, he could maybe stand to add a few more pounds to his frame, but even so, he’s got that deadly combination of size and skill that so many teams dream of in a top center. His vision, passing, shot, and hockey sense/smarts are all high-end, and he’s pretty sound defensively for a guy with his kind of offensive acumen. There are questions about how good of a skater he is and whether that may hold him back from being truly dominant, but all of the other tools are there for him to be a top center in the league for years. He’s been compared to the likes of San Jose’s Joe Thornton, and though it would certainly be tough for him or any prospect to live up to that kind of billing, it goes to show how highly thought of he is.
While there’s always hand-wringing about whether or not the Flyers have too much organizational depth at the center position, they’ve always been a team that builds down the middle, and that the voters out there chose him in this spot despite that apparent logjam speaks to his level of talent. The team would surely be thrilled to be able to drop Strome right in the lineup behind Claude Giroux within a year or two, and to eventually make him its top center when Giroux starts to decline way down the road (j/k j/k that’ll never happen right?).
With that said, outside of McDavid and Eichel, Strome is probably the one guy in this draft for whom it’s impossible to imagine any scenario in which he falls all the way to No. 7. Big centers who score almost two points per game in the OHL don’t fall to No. 7 in any draft. So this is all just pipe dreamin’… for now.
Anywho, on we move to spot number four. No new names will be added just yet, as the vote is still fairly concentrated between a few guys. Strome (45 percent of the vote), Boston College defenseman Noah Hanifin (28 percent), and London forward Mitch Marner (21 percent) combined to collect 94 percent of the popular vote together, so it’s pretty likely that one of those other two is the next choice.
Will it be Hanifin, the smooth-skating defenseman generally seen as the draft’s top blueliner? Could it be Marner, the smallish center/winger with blazing speed and incredible vision and offensive instincts? Or can someone unexpected pick up enough steam to make a big leap to this spot?
The choice is yours. Vote in the poll below before midnight ET tonight and we’ll check back again tomorrow.
(Note: since there seemed to be a little bit of confusion on this yesterday, here’s the question you’re trying to answer with your vote: If all of the players listed were available when the Flyers were on the clock, who would you want them to pick? Simple as that.)
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The 2015 BSH Community NHL Draft Board
- Connor McDavid, C, Erie (OHL)
- Jack Eichel, C, Boston University (NCAA)
- Dylan Strome, C, Erie (OHL) (45% of the vote)
- ???
Who should be No. 4 on the Community Big Board?
| Noah Hanifin | 162 |
| Mitch Marner | 214 |
| Ivan Provorov | 10 |
| Pavel Zacha | 1 |
| Mathew Barzal | 3 |
| Lawson Crouse | 8 |
