It’s that time of year again!

September first is great because it means hockey is right around the corner! The World Cup is coming, then preseason, and teams will be competing for the Stanley Cup before you know it. Maybe a Canadian team will even make the playoffs this time! Who knows? The sky is the limit.

There is one thing about this time of year that I hate though: Prospect rankings.

Everybody is coming up with their Top 20, Top 25, Top 100, Top Billion prospects around the NHL, and I never like it. Sure, I like reading about individual prospects and learning about them but it’s the ranking part that I hate.

The internet is full people people passionately debating whether or not the likes of Kasperi Kapanen should be called the Leafs’ fourth, sixth, or fifteenth-best prospect, comparing him to players they’ve probably never even seen play. When I managed this fine site we used to argue about these things all the time and the comment sections would be even crazier.

I have a solution: The Prospect Pyramid.

The video below explains the idea in-depth but what the Prospect Pyramid does is it allows you to rank prospects based on tiers instead of a ranking position. For example, I saw people debating on Twitter about whether or not Mitch Marner is a better prospect than William Nylander. How about this: Who cares? If the gap between them is small enough for us to have this debate, then they’re in the same tier. Make sense?

If you don’t have time for the full video, these are my tiers for the Leafs’ prospects.

Tier 1: Auston Matthews

Tier 2: Mitch Marner, William Nylander

Tier 3: Connor Brown, Kasperi Kapanen, Andreas Johnson, Travis Dermott

Tier 4: Nikita Soshnikov, Brendan Leipsic, Kerby Rychel, Jeremy Bracco, Dmytro Timashov, Tobias Lindberg, Andrew Nielsen, Carl Grundstrum, Zach Hyman

Tier 5: Frederik Gauthier, Rinat Valiev, Yegor Korshkov, Adam Brooks, Martins Dzierkals, J.D. Greenway, Viktor Loov, J.J. Piccinich, Jesper Lindgren

Tier 6: Everybody else

How did I get to that? Watch and enjoy!