And the next closest has 34 points to his 52.

He hasn’t been good this year, though he definitely was before getting injured (twice). And there are reasons to be skeptical about his upside after what we’ve seen this year, I certainly am.

But I go back to the broader discussion below, I still feel like your timeline expectations are off here. You say he’s 4 years post draft like that’s a long time, but in hockey it’s just not. Only 9 players in his entire draft class have played more than 100 NHL games so far, and he himself hasn’t even hit that threshold yet. Yes we can start to make judgments on players based on what we have seen, but it’s still incredibly early.

When this full tear down started, I remember listening to a lot of smart hockey people talk about how there’s almost no precedent for this full of a tear down actually working. And the big reason was because of just how long it takes players to even get to the NHL after you draft them, and from there it’s usually a few years before they’re actually good.

Even with the Bedard luck, I saw a lot of people tempering expectations and saying this is probably a 5-6 year process before being competitive even if they hit on most of their picks. Now you can certainly argue that if something is going to essentially punt that many seasons then it’s not the right thing to do. But if the organization accepted that path, year 4 is not the year to proclaim that it’s not working. We still haven’t seen (or barely seen) a bulk of the top prospects (Frondell, Vanacker, Kantserov, Lardis, Nestrasil, Boisvert, etc.) and the ones that are here haven’t played a full season of games yet other than Bedard.

Next year absolutely needs to show clear signs of progress.