51percentcorn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2019 9:51 am
The reality is - IMO - is that if you removed the generational play of Epstein - this year's freshmen class would be considered meh to below meh - with only hope for a few - and as a Wall St. trader once told me "Hope is a $h!++y Hedge"
- Narewski looks to have some potential but he won only 51% of his face-offs - should get better - we'll see
- Zinn scored what - 5 goals? Shot 18%? now I am in the camp that he sorely needs to play and they made a mistake shelving him for a while after the gaffe in the Syracuse game - but these are not the stats of the 7th ranked freshman in the country
Cattoni - small - worth noting that 2 of his 3 goals were scored when Hopkins was trailing by at least 7 goals and the 3rd was on man-up
Other than that - bupcus/zilch/zero - couple cameos by Blondell and McManus
That's not a great class - not even a good class - until you put Epstein there
I think you may be overestimating the contributions of previous freshmen classes because that seems right about the average to me—certainly well above average when you factor Epstein in. You can't really factor him out IMO but for the sake of argument we'll say he's an outlier.
Take our rising seniors—current major contributors are Williams, Smith, Rapine, Colwell, Hubler, possibly Giacalone if he wins the goalie job and perhaps a little bit of Stagnitta if he finds more time at middie. So that's 5 definite big-time important guys with the possibility of maybe a couple more. Seems like a solid senior class to me. But how many of them were contributing
as freshmen? Williams had 10 points on 18% shooting as an occasional attackman—worse than Zinn's first year certainly when you factor Zinn's contributions to the wings/transition especially at the end of the year. Hubler, Giacalone, and Stags were complete non-entities. Colwell was a man-down specialist. Rapine and Smith of course were major contributors. So that's 2 big-time guys, 2 more who got some PT and had somewhat complimentary roles. 4 total—probably more impactful overall than the Epstein class, but not by that much, really.
And then you have look at the rising juniors. Today we'd call Deso, Reinson, Keogh, Baskin, Prouty, Darby contributors with perhaps a light sprinkle of Shilling if you're being very generous. Again, though, how many of those guys were impact players as freshmen? Probably only DeSimone and Reinson, right? Darby didn't play. Keogh and Baskin COMBINED for 5 goals. Keogh had the same amount of goals as Mabbett did last year with 100 times the PT. Prouty faced off at 33% as the emergency #2 FOGO, taking something like 4 draws per game on average. There were 5 games in which he didn't appear at all and 4 others where he took 2 or fewer draws. You can argue whether or not that counts as impactful but I'd say not really.
Bottom line, the last three years of freshmen contributors:
2018 - Epstein, Zinn, Narewski, and Cattoni likely would have remained a second-line middie
2017 - DeSimone, Reinson, Baskin in literally one game against UMBC, Prouty if you have a soft spot for backup FOGOs
2016 - Rapine, Smith, Colwell and Williams sorta
The Shack, Tinney, Moreland, Fraser, etc. class was obviously a great one, but seems to me like every year for the past few years there have been only 1-2 major freshman contributors with maybe 1 or 2 more part-time role players. Perhaps this is an ongoing issue but if we're talking about 2019 specifically, the freshmen class as a whole seemed fine to me and it's only going to get more important. Epstein and Narewski not going anywhere, Zinn only going to play more and more, Cattoni if he's healthy will be a factor, Blondell, McManus, Mabbett are possibilities and by the way you've got a former Under Armour All-American in Mikey Gomez waiting in the wings.
, biology is a strong major at Johns Hopkins.
Or, in reality, the Corvair of college defenses.