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Taylor Hall continues to be criminally underrated

By Patrick Holden

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August 14, 2017 12:34 pm

The NHL Network has been filling the dead space of summer by releasing positional rankings and, oh boy, did their rankings of wingers have one glaring error.

Lists are hard. It’s impossible to please everyone and disagreement is a guarantee. So, it’s not fair to expect lists to conform 100 percent to our own rankings, but, in an ideal world, lists are accurate enough to where reasonable minds can disagree. The NHL’s ranking of wingers allows for no such thing because no reasonable person can agree that Taylor Hall is only the 20th best winger in the NHL.

Hall is criminally underrated on the list, coming in at 20th.

  • I can understand why some Caps’ fans may scoff at Alex Ovechkin only being ranked sixth, but I don’t think this is a criminally bad take. It’s not “Taylor Hall at number 20” bad, anyways.
  • Blake Wheeler gets some very deserved recognition here and could maybe be ranked even a little higher.
  • Brad Marchand at third? Okay.
  • But the real story here is Taylor Hall, one of the best forwards in the NHL, only being ranked as the 20th best winger. Hall being underrated around the league, and undervalued by the Edmonton Oilers, is nothing new. Last season Hall was traded for middle-pairing defender Adam Larsson. At the time, Hall ranked third among all NHL skaters in points per 60 minutes of 5-on-5 play over the previous four seasons:

  • Just to review, the full list of players who were more productive at 5-on-5 than Hall from 2012-16 is as follows:
    1. Sidney Crosby
    2. Jamie Benn
    3. That’s it. That’s the entire list

Again, I realize the maker of any list is certain to irritate someone. But some standard of accuracy should be expected from a list put out by the NHL Network. Ranking Taylor Hall as the 20th best winger in the NHL fails to meet any such standard.

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