We spent the whole week on the official vote, covering players who got zero votes, those who didn’t get enough votes, and the top two names in the Top 25. Now it’s time to pay attention to the vote from the community.
If you voted there this year, or the most recent years, you know that the structure is a little different. While we can force our official voters to pick only 25 players and rank them all from 1-25, the survey software isn’t sophisticated enough to force the community vote to run so cleanly. It is possible to rank a player or 44 or any number in between.
There were 314 responses this year, down from last year when there was a big surge in interest in hockey as the pandemic stopped being the only thing on our minds. It’s evident in many areas that hockey fans now have a big resurgence of other summer activities while hockey and the Leafs don’t get our attention as much. It’s no surprise in many ways, but for Leafs prospects there’s a distinct lack of elite talent and we’ve all noticed how much harder it is to decide between a large number of players we don’t really expect. never seen in the NHL.
However, three hundred responses is enough to help eliminate noise introduced into vote totals by incomplete vote submissions. Regular T25 fans will know that community voting is less drastic and more likely to reveal popular opinion about players.
Due to the voting structure, there are no literally unranked players, but out of 44 total picks, 19 didn’t get enough votes to make the top 25, and that’s what we meet today. The tabulation process for the community vote is very similar to the one we use for the official votes. The first place ranking is weighted at 25, up to 25th place which is weighted at one. Everything else is a zero, and that gives us the official order. I then invert the average on a scale of 1 to 25 to make it more intuitive to read.
The weighted average vote for your 25th ranked player is 20.8, and a small number of unranked players have averages between 21 and 24, but most are very close to 25, meaning that ‘they have almost no votes that count.
The 19 who didn’t make the cut (in order of lowest to closest to 25th) are:
- John Fusco – 24.83 weighted average
- Ryan O’Connell – 24.78
- Wyatt Schingoethe – 24.78
- Semyon Kizimov – 24.75
- Nikolai Chebykin – 24.54
- Vladislav Kara – 24.50
- Nikita Grebyonkin – 24.49
- Michael Koster – 24.45
- Braeden Kressler – 24.34
- Vyacheslav Peksa – 24.24
- Kalle Loponen – 24.23
- Joe Miller – 24.10
- Brandon Lisowski – 24.05
- Max Ellis – 23.68
- Axel Rindell – 23.54
- Pavel Gogolev – 23.38
- Artur Akhtyamov – 22.93
- Veeti Miettinen – 22.63
- Mac Hollowell – 21.82
I’d say everyone up to Rindell or Gogolev is a hard no, and the remaining few weren’t too far off from the 25th-ranked player. As we’ll see next weekend, your 24 and 23 are all very close to the vote for 25, but that’s a jump of more than one from 25 to 26. This vote has a clearer line showing who was and who was not.
Next weekend, we’ll be comparing the top ranked players on both the community vote and the official vote, and we’ll instantly see a discrepancy. You obviously didn’t rank Brandon Lisowsky at 25, so we’ve barely started and we’re already at odds.
Number 23 on the official list will be announced on Monday.
