I thought this was supposed to be the deepest draft for 18-year olds in recent history.....what happened?
Did the pool of first-year, draft eligible players dry up that quickly?
The thing is, when people talk about a "deep" draft, it's generally just about the quality of the 1st round as well as how much of that spills over into the 2nd round. This draft had an extremely good #1, a really strong Top-5ish, Top-10/15 range had very good prospects, and the range of credible "1st round caliber" guys stretched a pretty decent ways into the 2nd round.
Beyond that...draft lists and projections start to diverge so much, it becomes basically a crapshoot. You can't reasonably project the "depth" of the 4th round of a draft. Statistically, basically every draft levels off to a very similar longshot of even getting NHL games out of a player. At that point, you've got like 1:4 or 1:5 shot of getting an NHL player at best. And that's being really generous with a threshold for "NHL Player" success. That's like, Linden Vey is a "success". Markus Granlund was a resounding success who played like 3 times that many NHL games. Philip Larsen was a successful defenceman pick. Virtanen was a "successful" Top-10 pick. For context, and an illustration...
The chance of getting an actual "impact player" out of those rounds is massively lower and basically flat. At that point, you're angling toward just identifying the outliers who become late round stars who convince everyone that they're going to find the next hidden gem. But you might get 1 of those guys in a round out of all 30 teams, or you might only get one or two in the entirety of the 4-7th rounds. But that's not really what the "depth" of a draft is about, because it's entirely focusing on extremely low percentage outlier outcomes and that's goofy.
So when they say this draft was "deep" that really only applied to the 1st and 2nd rounds. Where we had 3 picks, but decided to only have 1 instead. The 3rd-7th round is always a crapshoot of flawed prospects and shots in the dark with various teams always trying to adjust strategies to somehow reliably beat the average but rarely succeeding.
Though we have seemed to lag consistently through like 4 different regimes or more when it comes to batting even average in those late round crapshoots.
I don't like this particular pick on profile...but i'm not really familiar with him so who knows. Seems plausible this is exactly the sort of pick that hurts our average. But there's really no point talking about "depth" of the 4th round like that. It's just teams differentiating themselves very slightly based on their strategy or approach.