At the top of the draft, a prospect's potential is as plain as the lines on the ice. For instance, among the elite of the 2011 entry draft, it's easy to see that Adam Larsson is hitting the tape on breakout pass after breakout pass or that the stick of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is a blur. That stuff jumps out. For those sitting comfortably in the top five on most teams' lists, the skills and physical assets have already shown through in their underage year.
Those players are the exception to the rule, though, with "the rule" resembling left winger Matt Puempel of the Peterborough Petes.
Puempel is solid, but seemingly not exceptional in most aspects of the game. He has decent size at 6 feet and 200 pounds. You'd rate his skating in the good-to-very-good range. And then, well, nothing jumps out. Or at least he doesn't regularly show anything so flashy that it really gets your attention.
And yet Puempel was the Canadian Hockey League's Rookie of the Year. He scored 33 goals and added 31 assists last season, making him the youngest player to score 30 goals for the Petes, one of the most history-rich major-junior franchises. (Those numbers would have been bigger if he hadn't missed five games with a concussion in October.) At 16, he played his way onto Peterborough's first line and onto the first power-play unit. With the Petes playing for their playoff lives in March, Puempel raised his game, scoring four goals and four assists in the last two games of the regular season.
Based on the stats, Puempel is obviously effective. What he does well might escape your notice if you took in a game.
"My game is getting to the net and winning crease battles, going hard on the forecheck and creating turnovers," Puempel said. Scouts say that it's a pretty fair reading of his game -- a lot of juniors are better with the puck than without it; with Puempel it's the other way around. He creates his scoring chances by skating hard without the puck and getting into the dirty areas of the ice. For scouts, it's something that shows through with more frequent viewing.
"A smart player, first and foremost, and that's not a knock," an Ontario-based scout said this week. "He'll play at the next level -- there's no doubt about that. It's just a question of what his high end is. Is he creative enough to be a first-liner? A second-liner? Based on what he did as an underager you can't rule anything out."
There are some skeptics in the scouting fraternity. "I just don't see the puck skills to project him as a player on the top two lines [in the NHL]," said a scout who saw Puempel play for the Canadian team that won gold at the Ivan Hlinka under-18 tournament last month.
Despite this supposed lack of puck skills, Puempel picked up three goals in four Hlinka tournament games, playing beside Victoriaville's Phillip Danault and Oshawa's Lucas Lessio on what amounted to the Canadian checking line. He ended up missing the gold-medal game because of a back injury that also kept him out of the NHL research and development camp in August.
In Peterborough, he played his way onto the first line after a rocky start. There were high expectations when he went from Essex (just outside of Windsor) to Peterborough as the team's first pick in the OHL entry draft, but the highest were his own. "My confidence was up and down last year," Puempel said. "The start of the season was the low point for me. I played only a little bit and I didn't score. I had some trouble getting to sleep the way it was going. I thought about it a lot and decided that I was just going to work that much harder -- first guy on the ice at practice, last guy off. You have to love going to the rink if you're going to have success."
Puempel's season had to be rated as a success, but the Petes' wasn't. "When I got here I didn't know anything about a team rebuilding," he said. That's what Peterborough was doing and Puempel had to go a week or two between wins at some points. And though the Petes were at the top of their game late in the regular season, they were knocked out of the playoffs in four straight games by Mississauga.
After the season, the Petes' ownership cleared out the team's staff to bring in a new coach, Mike Pelino, and a new GM, ex-NHLer Dave Reid. The team figures to be significantly stronger when two high 2010 draft picks make their way back from NHL training camp: forwards Austin Watson, Nashville's first-round selection, and Ryan Spooner, a second-rounder who has been tearing it up in the preseason for Boston.
Some scouts will put down Puempel's impressive season to his surroundings -- because the Petes were rebuilding, a spot on the first line was open and he had a chance to go out on the ice with Watson. It's a valid point, but not the only factor in play.
Puempel's game isn't flashy like Nugent-Hopkins' and he's not as polished as Larsson, who looks like a 10-year NHL veteran. Puempel is a player in development who knows how to score. If his learning curve continues to rise as sharply in his second season as it did in his first, he'll play his way into the top 10 of the draft.
Gare Joyce covers the NHL draft for Insider and is a regular contributor to the NHL Draft Blog.