It’s time for my annual look at player evaluations I was wrong about, and a discussion about what I learned from that.



I make a lot of predictions and player evaluations each year. In the farm ranking series alone, I evaluate about 800 players, on top of the hundreds I don’t rank for various reasons in that series, as well as the draft rankings and free agent rankings I do. There’s going to be a lot wrong just due to the volume of it. What I’m focused on here is not something that was wrong, but something I did in my process that I and our readers can learn from.



What I continue to learn from being engaged in the area of young player projection is that, while being a rewarding, intellectually stimulating field, it is extremely difficult. That is a sentiment shared across the industry among NHL sources. “It’s [expletive] hard,” said one head scout.



Added another head scout: “We’re doing everything we can to...