It wasn't a great week for Drummondville center Sean Couturier.

Even though this blog has Couturier ranked first overall in its latest top 50, I was pretty critical of his performance in the CHL Prospects Game. The consensus among scouts was that his play was decent enough in the first 20 minutes of that showcase game but fell off markedly the rest of the way and his team was on the wrong end of a 7-1 rout. That came hard on the heels of Couturier dropping to fourth overall on the list that TSN's Bob McKenzie compiles from polling 10 NHL GMs and scouts. (That list has him behind, respectively, Adam Larsson, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Gabriel Landeskog respectively.)

So other than that, how was your week Sean?

Okay, take a deep breath. One scout called in to offer up his umbrage with the knocks on Couturier. I'll give it to you word for word.

"Two seasons ago, when he's a double under-ager on a team that wins the Quebec league and goes to the Memorial Cup, he became everybody's first overall [for 2011], the best player in the world in his draft class. That summer he goes to the Czech Republic [for the Ivan Hlinka under-18s] and he basically confirms that he's everybody's No. 1, one of the best players and maybe the best prospect on a [Canadian] team that has a lot of the top 2010 draft class on it.

"Then he goes out and as an under-ager he leads the Q in scoring and he's doing it again with not a lot of support around him. He plays in the summer at the world junior camp, plays against the Russians two games in the November series and then a regular shift at the World Junior Championships. That's a ton of hockey he has played and that doesn't even start to account for the fact that he had mono in the fall. The bottom line is that he had nowhere to go but down and that's how scouts work."

That much is true. If you have an ego that bruises like a banana, you don't want to go into a season as the favorite to be the first overall pick in the draft. (In Couturier's case, he went into the season as a co-favorite with Adam Larsson.) It's the old familiarity-breeds-contempt theme, the dissenting scout suggested.

"We see it practically every year. The kid who has been around the longest gets picked apart. Everybody knows what he can do and then starts looking for holes in his game. That's how it worked with [Ottawa's Jason] Spezza with everyone slamming him because they had been watching him since he was 15. There were guys who'd tell you that Rick Nash couldn't play because he wasn't much of a skater. The kid who comes along late has all the advantages that way. That's why Taylor Hall was getting torn down and Tyler Seguin built up last season [going to No. 1 on Central Scouting's lists]. Seguin is a great prospect but Hall was the same story as Couturier is now ... except Hall didn't have mono and had two Memorial Cups and an under-18 world championship on top of everything else."

There are cycles within every draft class -- players appearing on the radar early as under-agers, others who emerge late. By function of repeated viewing, those who are seen most often are held to the highest standards and suffer by comparisons that are made -- with other players and even with their own past performances. Sometimes when you look hard, you don't see, or at least lose sight of, what's there. Instead you focus on what isn't.

I was probably over-critical of Couturier's play at the CHL Prospects Game. Scouts I spoke to at the event that night seemed less down on Couturier than I was. None were blown away by his play but none were taking the scalpel to him.

He was in a tough position. It's hard to impress when your team is getting whacked. Still, it should be easy enough to see what he should be able to do at the next level. He's a very tall kid with great hands and passing ability, vision and imagination for the game. He's a late-'92 birthday but he's only starting to fill out. You can still project growth -- both physical growth and growth in his game.

After the scout offered up his objections, he tossed in a throw-away line. "[Couturier] went out and was lights-out this weekend, just tore it up," he said.

Indeed. Two nights after the prospects game he scored a pair of goals and added and assist, finishing plus-2 and 16-for-24 in the faceoff circle in a 4-2 win over Val D'Or. He fully dominated play, set up the game-winner in the third that broke a 2-2 tie and then scored the insurance marker. It was a nice reminder of exactly of what Couturier is capable.

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