The draft is upon us, and 210 young men's lives will be changed forever on Friday and Saturday in Philadelphia.
As always, The Hart of Hockey will be live blogging the event, but no draft coverage would be complete without a final edition of the blog's signature cumulative draft rankings.
If you are unfamiliar with The Hart of Hockey's rankings, I'll be happy to give you a quick rundown of the system. If you are already familiar, just skip to the table below, but I'm sure you've already done that.
The cumulative rankings take an individual player's rankings in various pundits/scouting services publications and then finds the average score from combining all the rankings. In this addition, the outside ranking lists used were TSN's Bob MacKenzie and Craig Button, NHL Central Scouting (CS,) The Hockey News (THN,) International Scouting Services (ISS,) Red Line Report (RLR,) McKeen's Hockey, and HockeyProspect.com (HP). Since Central Scouting separates its rankings by European/North American and Skaters/Goalies, its numbers are only used as a tiebreaker if the values of two players' or more average score is the same.
Lastly, this is the time where I remind you that these rankings are not to be interpreted as a mock draft, but rather a different way to value the prospects heading into the draft and potentially project when their names will be called on draft day.
Things get progressively crazier outside of the top five, but The Hart of Hockey is very proud to have collected enough data to present you with 60 players ranked with the cumulative system, starting with Kootenay's Sam Reinhart.