On Sam Dickinson

What's the deal?

When the Sharks drafted Sam Dickinson this year, I was not pleased. Immediately after the 6’3” defenseman donned his jersey on the podium, the Minnesota Wild traded up to select the player I hoped Mike Grier and company would choose in Zeev Buium. Tweets flew, texts chimed. “Bad pick! I can’t believe it.” Yadda, yadda. Setting aside how absurd it is to get riled up about the teenager your favorite sports team chooses in a lottery, I think there are some merits to my concern about whom the Sharks took and whom they left to an obviously excited opponent.

Buium’s strength is that he creates offense. Sometimes dazzlingly so. Dickinson, despite his point totals as a 17-year-old CHL defenseman, does not. He’s an excellent skater who has a bit of this and a bit of that on both offense and defense. Nobody is mistaking him for the next Quinn Hughes or Cale Makar. I’m not sure anyone is mistaking Buium for either of those superstar defensemen, but at least the possibility exists.

Therin lies my consternation. I believe that NHL teams should only select defensemen early in the entry draft if they think said player possesses Cale Makar or Quinn Hughes or their ilk in his range of outcomes. I think this because offense wins championships. And if you sort of list of NHL skaters by some sort of offensive metric, it will be a who’s who of Connor McDavids and Nathan MacKinnons, with a few exceptions, Blueliners like Quinn Hughes and Cale Makar and Erik Karlsson — defensemen so adept at creating offense that they might be thought of as just another forward.

Teams that want to maximize offense will be more likely to achieve their goal if they focus on only the next Cale Makar or Erik Karlsson early in the draft. Which brings us back to Sam Dickinson. I don’t think any scout will tell you he profiles like one exceptions on the blueline. But because I’m biased and can’t read scouting reports without my own slant, I enlisted some help to tell us just what we’re dealing with in Dickinson.

If you’re new here, I recently had an LLM review scouting reports of star shutdown defensemen. The TL;DR is that prospects who go on to become shutdown NHLers share these qualities in spades:

• Excellent skating

• Excellent hockey sense/hockey IQ/on-ice processing

• Two-way effectiveness, meaning they contribute offensively and defensively

• Impactful in transition

Now, take a look at some of Dickinson’s scouting reports. I’m going to skip descriptions of his skating because the London Knights blueliner is without a doubt an exceptional skater.

Scott Wheeler from the Athletic:

“He defends at a very, very high level for his age both man-to-man, down low and positionally in his own zone. He has skill and poise with the puck in the offensive zone (which began to reveal itself more at the Hlinka Gretzky Cup last summer and has stamped itself for the Knights this season) and has started to make better and more consistent reads under pressure in his own zone. He still needs to read the ice and move it quicker at times and there are moments in games when he doesn’t process it fast enough coming out of his own zone and can turn over puck, but he also showed comfort and even deception past opposing forwards as the year progressed, and shows nice vision and touch when there are plays to be made. He’s not the most dynamic player with the puck, and some have concerns about his IQ.”

HockeyProspect.com 2024 Black Book:

“Offensively we don’t consider him a high-end offensive player, but he is still above-average. Depending on the team he goes to, he could get a PP1 role, but what he lacks in elite offensive tools (good, but not great) leads us to believe he would most likely be a PP2 guy on a good team. He’s good in transition, can pass the puck at a high level from his zone, is adept at long-stretch passes, and his decision-making is both solid and fast.”

“Defensively, it’s a similar story. We think of him as a very solid defender, but not an elite shutdown defenseman. We like his stick activation when it comes time to remove pucks from opponents, or at least make them uncomfortable when they go to his side of the ice. He covers tons of ice with his reach and is rarely in trouble due to his excellent skating.”

Will “Scouch,”

whose scouting sensibilities I think are closer to how I perceive potential draft picks:

“The only thing that comes to mind is that he's at his most impressive wheeling up below his goal line with the puck and bursting up the ice, and dropping a shoulder around the perimeter of the offensive zone to fend off pressure and maintain possession. At 5v5, his offensive creation as a playmaker is underwhelming, but he is often stepping up and taking higher percentage shots than many defensemen. The issues really come from his puck management skills, as he was one of the worst offensive transition passers I've tracked at the high end of the draft with some of the most hair-raising moments in the defensive zone stemming from his attempts to use skill and confidence to get through forecheckers. There's something there, but I didn't see enough defensive intensity in his game for too long this year and I still have a doubts, even 7 months later.”

EliteProspects.com 2024 Draft Guide:

“It’s when the game slows down and space is scarce that Dickinson’s projection becomes more fraught – especially with the puck on his stick. In the defensive zone, that often takes the form of inconsistent reads away from the puck and a propensity to get on the wrong side of his check. Dickinson can mirror footwork in close, take away space, and step into opponents to get stops, but his ability to track the play was an area of concern that showed up across our reports. As did his puck management once he’d won back possession.

The same dynamic shows up across his work in the offensive zone. Dickinson has some sense for when to activate into the play, usually recognizing openings on the weak side and stepping into them as a shooting threat, and even has a shot that can do damage from range, but he’s not consistently creating quality looks. Similarly, he has all the passing skill in the world but doesn’t often respond to, much less dictate pressure.

Put another way? We think Dickinson has all the natural ability in the world, but his feel for the game has been a consistent area of concern for our staff.”

EliteProspects also asked some anonymous NHL scouts what they see in Dickinson. Some of those responses are below:

“He’s a guy when you first watch the film or go see him live, he’s huge, he can really skate. I have some hockey sense concerns. I’m watching the Oilers and watching Darnell Nurse struggle. Dickinson will play in the NHL and play a lot of minutes. I think the hockey sense will limit how far this thing can go.”

“He’s really good… really good. To me, he’s the second-best defenceman in the draft. It goes Levshunov and then him. He’s versatile. He gets after pucks. He makes quick turns. He can skate the puck out of trouble. He can make good outlets. The only reason you guys in the public question his hockey sense is because he’s been a stud for two years and he gets overanalyzed. He’s got calmness. He’s got puck poise. He’s skilled for a big guy. He’s got range. He checks all of the boxes. He won’t get out of the top-five. Fifth overall is the absolute bottom for him.”

“I just don’t think Sam Dickinson is a very smart player. I don’t have him that high (fifth overall). I would take someone like Parekh over him every time. You can’t really say he’ll be a No. 1 defenceman the way he sees the ice. My feeling with Dickinson is that he’s a big guy, great skater, but he’s never had to learn how to actually play hockey because he can just skate his way out of trouble in junior. ”

Am I out of touch or are the scouts wrong?

When I read Dickinson’s scouting reports, I see many disagreements between different scouts or scouting teams. HockeyProspect.com thinks his IQ is very good, while the other sources question it. One NHL scout or executive believes the IQ questions are overwrought because the player’s been nitpicked to death. Some scouts think his offense is fine while others are perplexed. Other than on size and skating, there doesn’t appear to be much consensus.

Because I am obviously biased — I had my mind set on a different player even before the Sharks made the selection — I leveraged an objective source to compare Dickinson to those who have come before him as a gut check against my own manual close reading.

I asked the LLM Claude to analyze scouting reports from elite shutdown defensemen (in their primes, anyway) like Hampus Lindholm, Colton Parayko, Adam Pelech, MacKenzie Weegar, and Adam Larsson. I then asked Claude to compare Dickinson’s scouting reports to those of his predecessors.

The LLM thinks Dickinson’s scouting reports are an 8/10 in terms of how similar they are to the NHL stars. I also asked Claude to do a phrase analysis, to see what sort of superlatives are present in both descriptions of shutdown NHLers and Dickinson’s reports.

“Earlier Text” = NHLers. “New Text” = Dickinson.

Claude sees little discussion of Dickinson’s transition play, and more emphasis on decision making and hockey sense/IQ for the existing NHLers. Still, our amateur scout extraordinaire thinks Dickinson looks like a future NHL shutdown defenseman.

With post-draft clarity, I can see a better-illuminated pathway to NHL dominance for the large blueliner. Still, whether Dickinson turns into Chris Tanev or Filip Broberg will depend on whether the most optimistic assessments of Dickinson’s offense, IQ and transition game are correct. That Dickinson will be an NHLer isn’t foregone, but it’s highly likely, no matter how much of that fact may be due to existing NHL decisionmaker biases.

But if you’re picking at 11 and hoping for someone to anchor your defense core for six or seven years, I’d think you’d opt for a profile with fewer question marks. Or at least a profile that, if it hits, might be another Cale Makar or close to it.

So, even despite Claude’s insistence that Dickinson is on his way to the upper echelon of shutdown defenders, I have my doubts. These doubts are why I wasn’t excited about the selection when it happened and why I will remain skeptical until we see him start to answer some of the questions scouts had about his profile.