We’re halfway through ranking and reviewing the Leafs prospects, and we’ve come to the point I’d consider my favourite part. The part where we get to criticize the rankings from our readers. I mean celebrate them. Yes. That’s it.

In fact, it’s hard to criticize the rankings because they are pretty close to what we put together, and to some extent you’ve all had the luxury of getting another month of looking at some of the players. I’m not going to spoil anything yet, but there’s definitely one player I think with the extra month we’d all have warmed up to as well, maybe not as much as our readers did, but what can I say? Recency bias is a mother.

You can find a summary of 16-20 and the honourable mentions here:

And here’s who was ranked this week:

Well we’ve officially closed out the goaltenders. It was a fun, and maybe someday we’ll consider a goaltender one the Leafs top prospects, but not quite yet.

It’s worth noting that with the exception of Woll, all of these prospects were graded as C level prospects, but all had NHL readiness of either 1-2 years or 2-4 years according to our rankers. Mac Hollowell was the one we could see jumping up sooner.

We’ll see the TLN rankings for 1-10 in the next two weeks and we’ll revisit the reader rankings for 1-10 at that point as well. We allowed ourselves 3 honourable mentions, and we’ll do the same for our readers.

So a small bit of intrigue as the players selected remain the same, and both the readers list and the TLN contributors lists consist of the same 23 players. When it comes to our top 10s, the TLN Staff as Topi Niemela in our 10, while the readers have Roni Hirvonen in theirs. A swapping of the Finns seems somewhat reasonable.

Our writers didn’t have the luxury of seeing Ovchinnikov win player of the month honours in the MHL, though admittedly we were still too low on him.

As for Miettenen, I guess some of our writers (not myself, of course) need to get caught up to speed on Miettenen.

And for our readers, I think you all might have gone cold on Woll a little prematurely after his first year of pro hockey. Most goalies don’t come in and run the AHL in their debut season, and he’s still a promising prospect, but one we’ve become a bit more cautious about too.

Considering we have nine of the same players remaining on both the readers and writers lists, I’m interested in seeing how much they’ll synch up. I will say there were some interesting voting trends with the readers on the top ten, we’ll touch on that when we recap their rankings again after the #1 has been crowned.