>Krebs made his NHL debut, led the WHL in points, was named WHL Player of the Year, and played to a point per game in a stint in the AHL at 20. At 21, he became a full-time NHL player. This year, the 22-year-old will be a top-nine player on a Sabres team that has playoff aspirations, maybe even as a centre. He’s going to be a solid NHL player for a long time and has followed the timeline you’d hope a first-round pick would.
>So why is he on this list? Because he still looks more like the kind of player you’d look to draft No. 17 rather than No. 6. Ahead of the 2019 draft, I fell in love with his combination of speed, skill, playmaking, and work ethic, arguing that he was more than his modest 1.06 points per game and minus-50 rating on a dreadful Kootenay team (an argument that was supported by the 40 percent of the team’s goals that he was in on). And while he was more than those things, his specific toolkit is one I’ve been too fond of in the past. In each of those ways, he actually profiled a lot like Alex Turcotte, another high pick I was too high on in retrospect. And in both cases, their lack of natural finishing ability limited their upside and should have kept them out of the top-10 range on my lists. I still really like Krebs as a player. He’s hard not to like. But profiles like his are ones I’m now more leery of than I once was, if only because while they usually produce good players, they’re missing the scoring punch needed to be a star unless the playmaking game is truly elite, which in Krebs and Turcotte’s case it wasn’t/isn’t quite there.
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>C/LW Peyton Krebs (Buffalo Sabres — No. 17, 2019)
>My final draft ranking: No. 6
>Krebs made his NHL debut, led the WHL in points, was named WHL Player of the Year, and played to a point per game in a stint in the AHL at 20. At 21, he became a full-time NHL player. This year, the 22-year-old will be a top-nine player on a Sabres team that has playoff aspirations, maybe even as a centre. He’s going to be a solid NHL player for a long time and has followed the timeline you’d hope a first-round pick would.
>So why is he on this list? Because he still looks more like the kind of player you’d look to draft No. 17 rather than No. 6. Ahead of the 2019 draft, I fell in love with his combination of speed, skill, playmaking, and work ethic, arguing that he was more than his modest 1.06 points per game and minus-50 rating on a dreadful Kootenay team (an argument that was supported by the 40 percent of the team’s goals that he was in on). And while he was more than those things, his specific toolkit is one I’ve been too fond of in the past. In each of those ways, he actually profiled a lot like Alex Turcotte, another high pick I was too high on in retrospect. And in both cases, their lack of natural finishing ability limited their upside and should have kept them out of the top-10 range on my lists. I still really like Krebs as a player. He’s hard not to like. But profiles like his are ones I’m now more leery of than I once was, if only because while they usually produce good players, they’re missing the scoring punch needed to be a star unless the playmaking game is truly elite, which in Krebs and Turcotte’s case it wasn’t/isn’t quite there.