Silver Nuggets: When scouting, what's the most important?

With a bunch of talk on the direction of the Senators franchise, and a majority of Silver Seven readers favouring the team trade away roster players for picks in a strong draft, I thought it'd be interesting to see what exactly all of you look for in a prospect.

Basically, we're going to conduct a little exercise here in the comments, as unfortunately I can't institute a ranking system with the 'poll' setup. What I'd like to know and discuss is where you'd rate these "features" of a prospect in terms of their importance for their development into an impact NHL player. I understand that a player is made up of ALL of these things, in varying amounts, so the ranking of what's most important to you is really interesting to me. Also, for the sake of simplicity, we're going to say that you're drafting a first-time draft eligible player (forward or defenseman), and we're not going to take into account league (CHL, NCAA, Europe, etc.)

The "features" are taken from this CSS scouting report that I found on Joe Sakic. They are: skating, scoring, shooting, passing, puck control, positional play, checking, size/strength, character (desire, attitude), hockey sense. You'll see that there are more on the CSS report but I think that use of body, for example, plays into checking + size/strength. Feel free to add other things if you feel like I missed out on anything or made any wrong assumptions!

--

Sens Links

• The Sens only had one "weekend game", where they defeated the Coyotes 5-1. Here are your recaps. Also, like the game against the Avs, Pan and Canuck took in this game live and recorded a podcast right afterwards! [Silver Seven, Rank the Performances, Sens Callups, Ottawa Citizen, SensChirp, SenShot]
• In some fun Sens news, Bobby Ryan and Mike Hoffman will be representing the Senators at the all-star game! Everyone always gets into a fuss regarding who's chosen and who's not, but I don't really give it much weight anymore, especially when it's generally limited to one person per team. [Silver Seven, Ottawa Citizen]
• Bryan Murray is still looking to add a forward in order for the team to chase the playoffs. Now there could be a ton of reasons for this, but given the poll results from last week, I think a lot of you agree that the odds are heavily stacked against this team trying to leapfrog three teams to capture the second wildcard spot. [6th Sens]
• For more on this, Wayne Scanlan has a terrific piece on how a strong draft year and the track record of the Senators scouting staff favours the team accepting its fate and trading veterans for assets instead of the other way around. [Ottawa Citizen]
• Varada also talks about the Senators direction this season in this wonderful piece. A great read for me, as I share a lot of the same thoughts. Maybe you will too. [WTYKY]
• Joe gives us a players guide to the fun, team-building thing we call a road trip. [Bonk's Mullet]
• The S7 crew is starting to look at the upcoming RFAs, as there many of them and they are figure to be important pieces of the Senators future. Here are the first two entries on Alex Chiasson and Mika Zibanejad. [Silver Seven RFA Chiasson, Silver Seven RFA Zibanejad]
• Speaking of Alex Chiasson, he'll be playing his former team tonight. His possession numbers have actually been quite solid since the start of December so he's clearly doing some things right. Hoping that he gets a goal as a reward. [Ottawa Citizen]
• Mrs. O with a really informative Weekly Question, which goes into potential returns for the Senators if they decide to trade Anderson. Make sure to weigh in! [Silver Seven]
• Nichols recaps last week for us with his Friday news and notes column. Great read in case you missed anything! [6th Sens]
• Ken Warren takes a look at five different storylines from the first-half of the 2014-15 Ottawa Senators season. [Ottawa Citizen]
• The folks over at SenShot have their midterm grades for the Sens and revist their pre-season predictions. [SenShot - predictions, SenShot - forwards, SenShot - defensemen]
• In light of this, SensChirp looks at 10 questions for the second-half of the season. [SensChirp]
• B_T talked about stadium art a while back, and our own Sens artist, Amelia, weighs in. [Silver Seven]
• Here's your prospect update from Ian, who reports some grim things from Binghamton. Maybe the signing of Todd Bertuzzi will help (??????) [Silver Seven]
• Jeff certainly thinks that Todd Bertuzzi could really help the BSens. I really hope so. [SenShot]
• The BSens played two games this past week, but lost both in embarrassing fashion. [SenShot - v. Worcester, SenShot - v. Manchester]
• Here are your Week 14 Ups and Downs! The subjectivity is what makes this series really interesting to me. [Silver Seven]
• Kevin casts Marc Methot as "The Arrow", which is a pretty great comparison given everything that Methot's been through this season. [Bonk's Mullet]
• I listened to the latest episode of the Chet Sellers & Luke Peristy podcast on the bus yesterday and I'm pretty sure I snorted five or six times. [Silver Seven]/

NHL Links

• Given how this Nuggets is about scouting, I've gathered a couple of related pieces for you. First, Josh Weissbock on the NHL's scouting problem. [The Hockey Writers]
• William Nylander was recalled by the Leafs from Sweden, and their AGM Kyle Dubas had very reasonable things to say about prospect development. Environment matters. [The Score]
• A great piece from Mirtle on how coaching changes can impact a team [The Globe & Mail]
• A wonderful piece from Steve Ness, who watched EVERY SINGLE shootout since 2012-13 and kept track of some statistics in order to elucidate what makes players more successful. [Business of Hockey]
• With respect to the scoring chance numbers on War On Ice that I talked about a couple of weeks ago, Stephen Burtch has found that SCF% (scoring chance for %) is found to best describe past performance (Goals For %) whereas Score-Adjusted Corsi % best predicts future/remaining in-season Goals For %. [Twitter]
• #best Dustin Byfuglien gif. [Gfycat]/