We begin the Winter Top 25 Under 25 reveal this week with the saddest list: The Unranked. These are the players no one voted for at all.
As you know if you participated in the Community Vote, we used a different survey software this time. That format produced results where every one of the 45 choices was ranked by default by every respondent. This means the Community Vote can’t be easily split into unranked and honourable mentions like the PPP vote can. For the PPP vote, we all just rank 25 players and then stop. To derive the rankings we weight every non-ranked space at 25 (this should say 26), and calculate out the average vote from there.
To mimic the PPP vote, I’m going to assume the bottom portion on the Community Vote are the unranked. There’s always a few funky votes in there, out of 399 responses this time, so digging into the raw data isn’t really all that helpful in making this arbitrary distinction, but a quick look says that 15 are the players almost no one voted for and seemed to mean it.
So, without further ado, your unranked and our unranked:
The PPP unranked prospects under 25 (oldest to youngest):
- Vladimir Bobylev
- Nikolai Chebykin
- Vladislav Kara
- JD Greenway
- Joseph Woll
- Ian Scott
- Eemeli Rasanen
- Ryan O’Connell
- Semyon Kizimov
- Kalle Loponen
- Michael Koster
- John Fusco
- Ryan Tverberg
- Wyatt Schingoethe
- Joe Miller/
We have four of the just drafted prospects, a few from the last two years, and then a bunch of old hangers-on who are under indefinite rights, or in JD Greenway’s case, extended beyond the usual NCAA four years. The rules for rights retention make it inevitable this part of the list will be very Russian.
Nothing is too surprising here, except the presence of the now 22-year-old goalies Ian Scott (turns 22 in about a month) and Joseph Woll. I haven’t ranked these guys in years, but many other people have, and they are not unranked on the Community Vote. You’ll have to wait for the honourable mentions to see if they fell there on your vote or if they were, indeed, ranked in the top 25.
This might be an overcorrection on these two prospects, but the chances are always in your favour if you underrate a goalie. The only goalies to ever rate on a T25 were Garret Sparks, who peaked at 18; Chris Gibson, who made it in at 25th, Joseph Woll, who tied for 25th and then Woll and Ian Scott, who were at 16th and 17th in 2019. We dropped them off the list this summer, but the Community Vote kept them on, marking one of the major divergences between the official vote and the commentariat.
The bottom 14 on the Community Vote all have 14% of the available ranking votes or less, and all only have rankings over 25 in one or two cases. They are (in order of ranking which is likely influenced by their order on the original list):
- Vladimir Bobylev
- Axel Rindell
- Nikolai Chebykin
- Eemeli Rasanen
- Veeti Miettinen
- JD Greenway
- William Villeneuve
- Semyon Kizimov
- Ryan O’Connell
- Michael Koster
- John Fusco
- Ryan Tverberg
- Wyatt Schingoethe
- Joe Miller/
The bold names are the ones on both lists, so we largely agree, and where we don’t is on recently drafted players, and those goalies.
Next time, we’ll show you the honourable mentions, which is where it really gets fun to complain about who didn’t get enough votes to make the cut.
