Be honest, you won’t hurt my feelings: this is your favorite article of mine every year. You enjoy it when I have to take my lumps. It’s OK, I can take it.

The 2025-26 season will be my 10th hockey season working for The Athletic, and I’ve learned, over the years, that many of our readers enjoy reading about how we do our work on the prospects side as much as the actual work itself. To that end, I try to pull back the curtain on my work, acknowledging that if you’re going to spend money to subscribe to our coverage, you deserve to know exactly what you’re getting. I want my work to be authoritative and more well-sourced and well-researched than you can find anywhere else. In order to accomplish that goal, it needs to be trustworthy. And transparency breeds trust.

In an effort to build that trust and get better at the work I do, I regularly review old lists, highlight my mistakes and check my biases. My guide to scouting, updated annually, details how I do my job, from my process to how I watch games, the things I look for in players, potential blind spots and everything in between. My annual ranking reviews (my 2022 review will be out later this week) measure my track record relative to the actual draft and are meant to hold me accountable. And this piece looks back at the why and how behind the players I’ve gotten wrong over the years in an effort to better understand what I missed or over-/under-emphasized in my evaluations.

As you can imagine, after a dozen years of doing this work, there’s a long list to choose from. Here are five more players I was either too high or too low on.

Just try not to enjoy it too much.

Previous editions: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 

Jayden Perron, RW, Carolina Hurricanes (2023 NHL Draft)

Drafted: No. 94
My final ranking: No. 29

Perron is a smaller winger, and smaller wingers need to have a defining quality that can carry them. I thought his hockey IQ piece and the high level at which he thought the game inside the offensive zone were that for him. But he has looked much more like the mid-round pick he was than the late-first/early-second I viewed him as in the two years since, and after pedestrian freshman and sophomore years at North Dakota, he has now transferred to Michigan for his junior season. I think there’s a path at Michigan for him to become a point-per-game player there as an upperclassman under that coaching staff and in the top-six usage he’s going to get, but I don’t see more than an AHL offensive zone navigator at this point/future AAAA type. He’s still just 20, too. But because of the way the Steel played and what he could get away with at the USHL level, I don’t think I gave enough attention or weight to some of the predictable struggles he’d face up levels as an average athlete who is a little soft. He looked like he was checked out in some games at North Dakota last year, and he needs to play much more competitively if he wants to become a successful pro player with his profile. The sense, feel and problem-solving remain assets, but he hasn’t taken enough steps with the rest.

I think this is one where I let what people in the USHL thought about him have a little too much sway on me as well. They thought he was an elite thinker with the Steel, and while I’m always careful when it’s a player’s own team that’s saying those things, several other prospects from opposing teams also told me during my survey that year that he was the most purely talented player they’d played against and there was probably a little confirmation bias for me when his peers echoed the Steel staff.

His type has a tougher time than I accounted for on this one.

Brad Lambert, C/RW, Winnipeg Jets (2022 NHL Draft)

Drafted: No. 30
My final ranking: No. 8

This is one where I didn’t get the player wrong, but more the risk-reward calculus on the slotting. I knew exactly what Lambert was, and my actual evaluation and scouting report on him at the time was bang on. I knew the work he had to do, the warts he had, the top-six-or-bust potential and the complicated, mercurial player and person. I’d sat down and talked with him about it all. I talked to a ton of people who’d been around him. I knew and reported that he was going to go in the late first.

But I also didn’t like the draft class, and I felt a lot of its other first-round forwards had flaws or projection issues, and so I decided to bet on his skating-skill combination to win out and for him to become a productive second-line forward. He still might become that, too. But I should have set the threshold for when I was going to be comfortable making that bet and taking on that risk lower than I did because his development was always going to come with some ups-and-downs and require the right roster spot being available with the right coach at the right time (after making some important development progress in a few areas, some of which he made real progress on and some of which he’s still working toward).

There have been plenty of times over the years when I would have stuck my neck out for guys I liked at draft tables and been right. But I wouldn’t have even done that with Lambert, where I had him ranked at the time. I outsmarted myself with the placement at No. 8.

Lian Bichsel, LHD, Dallas Stars (2022 NHL Draft)

Drafted: No. 18
My final ranking: No. 51

Bichsel is another player whose scouting report I got right, but whose slotting I got wrong. I worried about his weight and heaviness and what it would mean for him as he got older, and while that’s still a concern and something he’s going to have to stay on top of as he ages, he was always going to become a strong and unique NHL defender because of it and his strong mobility underneath it. I still think he has some limitations, and he’s still a player I probably wouldn’t have taken at No. 18, even with the hindsight I now have and some of the adjustments I’ve made to what I value, but No. 51 should have been pretty clearly too low as well. There are guys in the 20s-40s who I can live with having ahead of him at the time, but there are at least 10 in there that wouldn’t be palatable to me as an evaluator now and shouldn’t have been ranked higher even then.

Jack Hughes, C, Los Angeles Kings (2022 NHL Draft)

Drafted: No. 51
My final ranking: No. 29

Hughes was the youngest player in college hockey in his draft year and had a respectable freshman year for a 17- and 18-year-old, registering 16 points in 39 games to finish fourth among the 14 under-19 forwards who played college hockey that year (behind Chaz Lucius, Jack Devine and Dylan Duke). I saw a player with a respectable statistical track record who seemed to make his linemates better, had legit hands and played center. I felt that profiled as late-first/early-second and kind of just assumed that he’d take a step as a sophomore. But I think how early he entered college (he was through his four years by 21) worked against him ever getting to that next level, even after a transfer from Northeastern to BU for his junior year. He was also of average size and lacked hardness. The result is a player who didn’t get an entry-level deal out of college and will have to start his pro career in the fall on an AHL contract with the Ontario Reign. I think he probably becomes a middle-six AHL contributor now, but I don’t see a clear identity or role for him at the next level.

Simon Robertsson, LW/RW, St. Louis Blues (2021 NHL Draft)

Drafted: No. 71
My final ranking: No. 30

There is a difference between a good junior player or a good mid-tier pro and a good NHL player, and every scout will tell you about players they’ve liked over the years who looked really solid in their age group, or even played up levels earlier than some of their peers, but they should have known didn’t have that next level in them. Robertsson is one of those players. He played and scored in the SHL the year before his draft year and was a solid player pre-draft for Sweden’s 2003 age group, wearing a letter at U18 worlds. But if you look at his stats page, you’ll also see that he then bounced between Sweden’s junior level and its two top pro rungs in the HockeyAllsvenskan and SHL for four years, remaining a solid young player but struggling to take a step. He was signed as a third-round pick, which in and of itself is a win for the Blues, and played last season in the AHL as a solid player there as a 21-year-old rookie as well.

But he was always going to have a pro career, and that doesn’t mean you give him a late-first/early-second rating necessarily. He’s also the classic average-sized, average-skating, average-skill, decently versatile, decent play-driving winger who wasn’t a clear power play or penalty kill option, or a clear skill guy or checker, and was naturally going to likely settle in as more of a potential call-up or organizational depth than a full-time NHLer with a clear role.

I even knew it at the time, too, I just didn’t move him accordingly. Those ones hurt. This was in my report: “Recent viewings (both before and into U18s) did leave me feeling like he was missing the defining skill.”

That there are three players ranked 29-30 on three different lists included here has me wondering if I’m being too cute with the last couple of spots in the first round on my lists as well (though I think it’s also probably indicative of where lists generally begin to teeter off into a tier of prospects who by and large don’t become full-time NHLers).

(Photos of Lian Bichsel and Brad Lambert: Michael Reaves / Getty Images and Darcy Finley / NHLI via Getty Images)