Jets prospects get top grade from Hockey News

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This article was published 04/03/2015 (3869 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE Winnipeg Jets have received another strong endorsement this week for the young talent pool they’re assembling.

The Hockey News published its annual Future Watch issue Tuesday and gave the Jets a grade of A for their prospect list and NHLers 21 and under, the highest grade it awarded among the NHL’s 30 teams for 2015.

The Jets’ grade was given for NHL regulars Jacob Trouba, Mark Scheifele and Adam Lowry, and six players who landed in THN’s list of top 75 prospects overall — Nikolaj Ehlers, Josh Morrissey, Joel Armia, Nic Petan, Connor Hellebuyck and Brendan Lemieux.

“As an organization, we’re proud of the group of prospects that we’ve been able to assemble over the last few years,” Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff said Tuesday. “Our scouting staffs have worked very hard and put in countless hours to get us to the point that we are now. We’re honoured to be recognized like this by The Hockey News.”

Having six players in the top 75 prospects isn’t common.

“It’s very unusual,” said Future Watch and Hockey News senior editor Brian Costello. “In the last 20 years, I think I’ve seen it five or six times. And it actually happened twice this year. Detroit has six guys in the top 75 but they didn’t have any 21-and-under NHLers and the Jets had three, so that was the difference.”

After the world junior, Costello and his staff contact all 30 NHL teams for a top-10 list of prospects. With a master list of 300, they send it back to one representative from each team, a GM, scout or player-personnel director, requesting letter grades, and also grades for each team’s 21-and-under NHL players.

High and low marks are factored out.

Interest in the issue has been high in recent years, Costello said.

“And feedback from scouts and teams is picking up,” he said. “We used to rely on four or five scouts, now we have 13 (responses) this year and in some cases it’s been 17 or 18 recently. It’s pretty authoritative. We’re not just a bunch of guys in Toronto saying, ‘Oh, Buffalo looks good, let’s put them at the top.’ We’re actually going to the guys who watch the players.”

The Feb. 11 trade that sent Evander Kane, Zach Bogosian and prospect goalie Jason Kasdorf to Buffalo for Tyler Myers, Drew Stafford, Armia, Lemieux and a first-round pick this year likely clinched the Jets’ place atop the Future Watch grades, given that scouts and GMs graded Armia and Lemieux in the overall top 75.

Last year’s Future Watch edition gave the Jets a grade of B, which ranked them eighth of 30 teams.

The new list got some attention from the team Tuesday.

“Everyone’s excited about the way we’ve drafted and the way we’re developing players,” said Blake Wheeler. “You’ve seen the impact some of our guys have already had with Trouby (Trouba), with Scheifs (Scheifele) and Lows (Adam Lowry) coming in. That’s going to be the way this franchise lasts through the long haul. And with some of the guys who have performed well on the big stages it creates some excitement around our organization.”

Jets coach Paul Maurice was also asked about recognition and quipped: “We can’t even pick the weather tomorrow. I don’t think there’s a person in that room, including the coaches and management, that has a contract that runs that long. So… we’ve got to work real hard here now to hope that everyone’s around for it.”

Scheifele, Trouba and Ehlers grace the issue’s cover under the headline ‘Meet your 2019 Stanley Cup Champions’ with a subhead that says ‘Yes, We Mean The Winnipeg Jets.’

“It’s a little far in the future and so you don’t really want to pay too much attention to that,” Scheifele said Tuesday. “But I think it’s just we have a lot of guys in our system and playing already. Obviously it’s a good thing looking forward to see the guys that are coming up and the guys that are developing in the system.

“It’s just more of a compliment. You can’t really look too far into that. It’s a cool thing to see and it just makes you work a little harder and more excited as well.”

Costello said the cover was designed for reaction.

“We’re always looking for something provocative for our cover and with so many good, young players already in Winnipeg’s system plus a deep list of prospects, maybe about four years from now might be their time,” he said. “So we took a couple of their good players already (Trouba, Scheifele) and added their top prospect (Ehlers) and went with that. We’re trying to sell magazines, so we mentioned the Stanley Cup for 2019.”

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca

— with files from Ed Tait