The Other Stars: Teddy bear brawls, and Antonio Stranges, the official AHL player of the week.

Last week was a real doozy in Stars prospect land.

Identifying development in a prospect is a difficult task in and of itself.

First you have all of their assembled skills to assess. The tangible stuff, like shooting, skating, passing, transitioning, and vision. There are intangible skills, like a player’s routes, wallwork, and their on and off-puck movement. And you have latent skills too, like their pressure play, teammate chemistry, and grit. Within that broth exists a curve that follows an upward, downward, or straight path. Progress is not linear, and so it’s not always clear when or how a prospect is developing. But what happens when that player skips the development phase, and goes straight to ‘stardom’?

It’s important not to rush to judgment here. Yes, I’m talking about former fourth rounder, Antonio Stranges. But this is not a question about Stranges so much as a question about all prospects. What happens when their skills on ice are no longer subtle? What happens when they’ve turned into raw, uncut, impact players from shift to shift?

This is where we turn back to Stranges. Yesterday he was selected as the AHL Player of the Week after scoring three goals and tallying five assists for eights point in four games. He’s now eighth in AHL scoring with 23, technically above Rocco Grimaldi, and just below former 13th overall pick (Chicago) Frank Nazar. This, of course, leads the Texas Stars by a solid margin, as he’s overtaken Justin Hryckowian’s previous lead. For perspective, Stranges has already achieved his point total from last season…through only 19 games.

In my August article on Stranges, I was as charitable toward his game as I was harsh. Stranges has always been a confusing player to even the sharpest scouting minds. It’s rare for a player with such clear talents fail to have an outward impact. And that was Stranges for a minute there. Except now that impact has arrived. And then some.

What makes Stranges’ emergence all the more intriguing is that Dallas will need a real trade chip to get what they want at the trade deadline. This is just pure speculation, but Stranges’ timing couldn’t be better from a market perspective; especially if, as they argued on the PDOcast, if you believe that a young core is no reason to be lax during a competitive window. In some ways, Stranges is the perfect wager: an unproven forward prospect at the height of his rep. Nill is usually pretty stingy about trading prospects. However, one could argue that reticence cost him when Julius Honka was on the table for (then in New York) Cam Talbot. Is Stranges another Honka, another Logan Stankoven, something in between, or something else entirely?

That’s the real question. Although it was only a week’s worth of action, Stranges provided us with a minute and thirty seconds of instructive shifts to help answer that question.