On Friday we finished up with the end of the TLN Prospect Rankings with the organization’s top prospect, Nick Robertson. For our ten voters, 7 of us selected Robertson as the top prospect, with two opting for Rasmus Sandin, and one bold, but likely correct in hindsight vote for Rodion Amirov as the top prospect.

There was plenty of variance within the top four amongst the TLN voters, as there was plenty of love to go around for Sandin, Amirov, Liljegren, and Robertson. That held true with the reader vote as well, and with a much tighter battle for first overall, with one selection of first over second making the difference between the first and second place ranked prospects.

So despite the fact that it was a much closer battle between Robertson and Sandin, both the readers and the writers produced the same order for the top seven prospects, and only a flip flop of the 8 and 9 order with Kokkonen and Abruzzese makes up the difference in the top nine.

Even when it comes to the 10 spot, both the readers and the writers were high on a Finnish draft pick, but our writers preferred Niemela to Hirvonen, slightly.

The takeaway from this is probably that this is the 100% correct order of Leafs prospects, and disputing it would be silly. I’m sure our writers would like a chance to go back and re-rank Dmitri Ovchinnikov, since he took off right after our voting completed, and the might be some additional caution all around on Nick Abruzzese, now that we know he won’t be playing hockey this year.

For now our prospect exercise is complete, and we look forward to when Kyle Dubas gives us new kids to assign value to, and for this group to prove us write or wrong.

I want to thank everyone who participated in this exercise, either voting or writing up prospects, but what to especially acknowledge Nick Barden, our creative genius behind our 2020 header images.

You can find the full recap of the TLN writers player rankings and some recent news on the prospects below: