Kemell hasn’t taken a step in Liiga this season after an excellent age-adjusted year in his draft year, but he performed well at the summer and winter world juniors, where he played a competitive and borderline-powerful style while still getting his looks inside the offensive zone. I’d like to see him slow down and utilize his linemates a little better than he does as he’s actually a heady playmaker when he opens his plane of sight, but part of what makes him exciting is his insistence on creating his own looks (even if that comes with some forcing it) with that shot of his. He really can sling it, with a wrister and one-timer that both pop. Off of the puck, he also plays with some energy and doesn’t shy away from the physical side of the game, which has endeared him to coaches to this point despite his 5-foot-11 frame. Those tools enable him to take advantage of his dangerous NHL wrister and one-timer, both of which he can get off quickly from a variety of stances and at a variety of tempos. On the puck, he’s agile through cuts, threatening one-on-one and changes of direction and plays an intentional, attacking style. Kemell is a highly-gifted, shot-creating winger who excels with the puck on his stick, carves teams up through coverage to take the play from the flanks to the interior, and possesses quick, light hands. Though they lack a high-end defence prospect, the Predators have quality and quantity at forward, a top goalie prospect, a handful of B-grade prospects on D, and good depth throughout that resulted in five difficult cuts from this year’s list.Ģ022 prospect pool rank: No. Still, it’s a strong group supported by a rare re-addition of a prospect who was last year thought to be graduated (Philip Tomasino) as well as a trio of picks from their 2022 draft who’s broken into the ranking for the first time. Though the Predators rank at the front of that second tier (a tier which I would consider to be the league’s above-average pools), I debated ranking them behind the 12th-ranked Hurricanes and 11th-ranked Canadiens and they’d sooner rank closer to the teams in the early teens than to the league’s true top group of nine pools. If I were to break this year’s countdown into tiers, it would have looked like this: 32-28, 27-18, 17-10, and 9-1.
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