The Flyers were able to get their man in the FanSided.com 2021 NHL ENTRY MOCK DRAFT. Or were they? In collaboration with team sites we were able to simulate the first round of the draft. Sites were asked to take players after assessing a series of variables , including prospect depth, positional depth, numbers of picks. After that the good times ensued.
To put things into perspective, this is an unusual draft from the standpoint of evaluations due largely to the Covid restrictions and the cascading affects they had on the leagues and the players. There were not as many games played in a typical season. League schedules were stopped, started, restarted, and some skipped play entirely. Players were forced to play for different teams, some in different countries. If scouting is putting together pieces of a puzzle, Covid dumped five puzzles into a bag and shook the stuffing out of it.
With so many players in new places and the new configuration of games and leagues, all the old institutional baselines and anchor points were lost, leaving scouts to make evaluations in a vacuum with little in the way of familiarity or reference points. Predictably this made consensus hard to come by and the variance between scouting service rankings vast. This kind of information inconsistencies will cause players to rise or fall in selection more so than in more stable seasons. Which makes the entire process more fun!