BURKE: Mocking the First-Round of the 2020 NHL Entry Draft

Under normal circumstances, I’d have just returned from the U18 World Hockey Championships in Plymouth, Michigan, fresh impressions of many of the 2020 NHL Draft’s best prospects foremost in my mind.

These, of course, are not normal circumstances. There’s no U18s this year, and Hockey Canada just announced on Tuesday that next year’s scouting season is going to start a bit later than usual with the cancellation of the Hlinka-Gretzky Cup in Edmonton.

That’s the bad news; now for the good. We’re still getting the 2020 NHL Draft, whether it happens in June, the end of the summer, or the middle of next fall. It’s happening.

In preparation for that moment, we put out an updated ranking of the top three rounds of players, and then introduced another layer of analysis by running that board by som