There is so much written about the top prospects each year, but you can still be left wondering: “Just how good is Jack Hughes? Is he Connor McDavid good?”



To put the top of the 2019 class into perspective, I ranked the very best NHL Draft prospects of the past five years, using the perspective of evaluations from when these players were draft-eligible, ignoring what has transpired since then.



What’s important to emphasize is these are my evaluations at the time of the draft, not now. So jumping to a conclusion like “how in the world do you think Jesse Puljujarvi is better than Mitch Marner” is incorrect, unless discussing them in past tenses.



Obviously there will be egg on my face in several instances, particularly the 2017 draft where I wasn’t super high on Cale Makar or Elias Pettersson heading in, and my rankings of nearly every one of these draft classes would be substantially different as we’ve gotten new...