Article - Top 5 Defensemen prospects

[Tony Piscotta]

http://www.hockeysfuture.com/article...sh_defensemen/

[FiLe]

Not bad. Some might argue that Vatanen should be no.1 though. He's definitely huge strides ahead of Hakanpää as of now, but to say which one of them has a better chance of making a nice career in the NHL is pretty much a crapshoot I suppose. Vatanen does have a frame that's not doing him any favors.

Also, Vatanen being picked to last year's worlds team is not technically true, considering he was injured weeks before the team was named. People pretty much agree though that it's very likely he'd been in that squad otherwise.


Klingberg is bit of an oddity as well, since he already went back to Sweden as observed (and apparently for good). Plus the title of the article is worded as "Finnish defensemen" which pretty explicitly refers to nationality, not the league. "Top Five Defensemen in Finland" would be my suggestion to amend the issue.

[thomast]

I like Jani Hakanpää alot but Sami Vatanen is regular in finnish national team and is probably going to make it into 2012 WC-roster Hakanpää isn't close being National team player. There's still big difference between Vatanen and Hakanpää.

[YARR123]

If this is based purely on nhl potential, you could argue that Hakanpää is ahead of Vatanen. But tbh Vatanen is one of the best Finnish d-men in Europe currently, so to say Hakanpää is ahead of him as of now is just wrong. Nothing taken from Hakanpää I really like the kid and think he can go far.

[bebl]

Hakanpää

[Juzmo]

Yeah not bad, but Vatanen in all honesty should be number one on that list.

Edit. Also instead of Ekbom would like to see Tommi Taimi's name in there. I mean all homerism aside, he does have 14 points and is leading the league in +/- with +21 in 42 games as a rookie. Also over a year younger.