Retrospecting: How the f*** did Thomas Harley fall to Dallas in 2019?

Let's unravel a mystery.

Thomas Harley original artwork by Ryan Konzelman.

It’s something I can’t stop thinking about. Layers of curiosity and confusion keep wrapping themselves around my brain like scarves.

How. The. F***. Did Thomas Harley fall to Dallas?

How did a 6’3 top pairing defender drop to 18th overall in a lameduck draft like the one in 2019? This may seem like an obvious question, but I don’t think it is. Like, at all.

Identifying why certain prospects fall is easy. There’s usually an easily-identifiable physical trait the prospect is lacking. Maybe they’re not tall enough (see Cole Caufield and Logan Stankoven). Maybe their skating is bad (Jason Robertson). Maybe it’s because they’re Russian (funny how a league that openly brags about not developing players struggles to make players far from home feel at home), which is less of a thing than it used to be, but it was a thing under the watch of most people still running teams, so it’s worth reiterating.

If anything, physicality tends to wield an anchoring effect on the drafting of prospects. Look at players like Seth Jones (4th overall), Samuel Morin (11th overall), Darnell Nurse (7th overall), Rasmus Ristolainen (8th overall), Nick Ritchie (10th overall), Lawson Crouse (11th overall in 2015), Logan Stanley (18th overall in 2016), Michael Rasmussen (9th overall in 2017), and so forth. I’m not calling these players bad. Some of them I actively like. The point, rather, is that if we shrunk these players just a few inches, those drafts probably look a lot different.

And that brings us to Harley. Lacking physical traits was never Harley’s issue. The tools he’s currently leveraging — namely his skating, and offense — were the things he had on draft day. He was tall, fast, and played big minutes for the Mississauga Steelheads in the OHL. So how did he fall?

First let’s look at snippets of his profile at the time. Here’s Scott Wheeler, who had him ranked at 29. (For the sake of brevity I’m only quoting the critical parts since we already know what made Harley an interesting prospect.)

But I have concerns about other areas of his game that have mitigated him from consideration in my top-24 tier. The biggest is his play in his own zone (though some of that was a byproduct of workload, the tough competition he was tasked with and the fact that he was playing nearly 30 minutes a night for stretches this season). Harley does a decent job defending the rush with his reach but he lacks physicality in puck battles and plays too passively within D-zone schemes, which can result in some ugly shifts. Still, Harley’s August birthday, coupled with a strong follow-up performance at U18s after an excellent regular season bodes well for the growth that he needs to happen.

Here’s Corey Pronman, who had him at 20, echoing the same thing.

Defensively he’s a bit of a work in progress. His feet and stick allow him to make stops and close gaps, but he needs to bulk up a lot and be better at times in his own end. Harley makes a lot of plays but tends to get too cute and make costly turnovers. Some scouts argue that was just the byproduct of the massive and arguably excessive minutes he played.

Here’s David St-Louis from Eyes on the Prize.

It’s inconsistent. On certain nights, he alternates between being too passive, looking disengaged as he glides upright in and around the slot in his end; and being too aggressive in trying to pry away the puck from opponents.

(I do want it noted that St-Louis was the only who distinguished between elements of good and bad defense rather than painting his question marks with a broad rush.)

The good folks at EPRinkside ranked him 22nd overall.

None of this is crazy or out of the ordinary. And this is not an attempt at hindsight analysis. But here are quotes about the defenders — in this case Victor Soderstrom, Cam York, Philip Broberg, Moritz Seider — picked above him.

• “My only major concern with Soderstrom’s game is one of upside. “

• “Seider’s main criticism from scouts is his lack of standout puck skill and that he won’t be a true power play guy in the NHL.”

• “But I still have concerns about his (Broberg) decision-making as well as his puck handling (there are way too many bobbles at the offensive zone blueline that go the other way).”

• “York skates well. He lacks a dynamic top gear you’d like in a small defenseman, but he can skate pucks out of trouble or into the offensive zone.”

Sidenote: I left out Bowen Byram because he was the only defender universally recognized as the top of an otherwise thin class.

That’s the part I find confusing. Harley had flaws, but so did everyone else. And many lacked the physical tools Harley has. Soderstrom was well-rounded, but small. York was neither big nor a swift skater. Broberg was size, speed, and question marks. Speaking for myself, while I was around for the 2019 draft and a huge fan of Nils Hoglander, I wasn’t as in the thick of draft coverage as I’ve been in more recent years.

I’m not gonna try to unpack any draft minutiae because I wouldn’t be able to say. But I will note an interesting one. I asked the good folks of HFboards and someone mentioned the U.S. NTDP craze. Which is true. Seven players from that insane USHL team — Jack Hughes, Alex Turcotte, Trevor Zegras, Matthew Boldy, Spencer Knight, Cameron York, and Cole Caufield — went in the top 15 that year. Perhaps it biased some draft boards, botching the standard order of things? Regardless, defensemen is a premium position, so I don’t necessarily buy it, especially with the defenders that went above Harley. But it’s worth mentioning.

So what happened?

Harley’s fall got me thinking about about the academically-famous study by Philip Tetlock. The study was about good judgment (which is what his future project came to be called) but the context was the Cold War. Sitting in a 1984 meeting at the National Research Council, Tetlock was suddenly privy to the political equivalent of a draft war room — just, you know, with higher stakes. Struck by the authority with which experts tried to make predictions about what might happen, he eventually put their predictions to the test. Using a rating of persistence of status quo-more of something-less of something, the bottom line was this: experts suck at forecasting. It was easy to be fooled by expertise.

That seems obvious enough — who can predict the future anyway??? — but it doesn’t unravel the mystery.

Good forecasters do exist, and they were used in Tetlock’s study. He distinguished between the two groups as foxes and hedgehogs (taken from the 1953 essay). Hedgehogs were single-problem experts. Foxes were experts of breadth. How much you wanna bet that scouts, GMs, and most people predicting the future of a teenager’s success comes from a single group of hedgehogs?

That’s not to minimize expertise, or pretend like I know better. Far from it.

I just find it hard to believe that THIS is the group of hedgehogs I shouldn’t ever question, or second-guess; the same group that brags about failing to develop. According to Tetlock:

Good judges are good belief updaters.

Does that sound like the judgment profile of your average NHL scout, GM, or coach? That’s not to stereotype, and it’s certainly not to pretend like I could do better. No; just a little calling into question of more self-awareness.

For now, what matters for Stars fan is they may have the best defenseman from the 2019 draft. My question is: was it a hedgehog or a fox who got that one right?