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Ryan Mantha

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Didn't know where to put this. Mods feel free to move.

Shares the same name and frame as Anothony, but doesn't seem to be related (as far as I can tell).

Ryan was No. 55 on Craig Button's Dec 9th prospect ranking. He's 17, plays D, shoots right, stands currently at 6'5" 195 lb, and is from Clarkston, MI.

Can anyone figure out if their related? They look alike, have similar stature, maybe cousins? Also comes from hockey pedigree like Anthony.

Commited to UND next year I believe. Regardless of relation, could be a good 2nd round D pick up.

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Speaking of Anthony Mantha, I've never seen him play, but he has 35 goals and 38 assists for 73 points in only 32 games. He's nearly 20 points ahead of the next guy!

For comparison, Jonathan Drouin has 50 points in 23 games. I've heard Mantha isn't very good at all defensively, but he seems like a truly natural scorer.

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The not being good defensively makes me nervous that it will take him years to get up on the Wings. Babs has a thing for responsible two-way players.

I know I might be in the minority but I think if a guy is a natrual goal scorer (forward), defense should be an after thought at best. Does anyone really care if Stammer sucks at defense or not? The guy is a scoring roboter and does his job extremely well.

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Anthony is serviceable on defense, he is really not that bad from the games i've watched, and is great on the boards because he uses his size. The only knock on him is compete a full 60 minutes, which he has already improved on this year a lot which was probably the Wings organization that told him to work on that part of his game.

They said he could have really went in the top 10, but his compete level wasn't where it should have been so most skipped on him. He will have more points then Drouin did last year in the same amount of games if he keeps his current pace. We are lucky to have this kid.

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I remember reading something about Ryan Mantha and being really confused for about ten seconds, and then figuring it out. Epic story, I know.

I don't think they're related, but I could be wrong. And 6'5-200 is indeed huge for a high-schooler. But then, that's what The People want these days. Freakishly big defensemen who shoot RH.

As for Anthony - I've said it before and I'll say it again: I can't believe we got this kid.

Does he need to work on his compete and defense? Yes. But the good news is he's coachable (receptive to constructive criticism and instruction, genuinely wants to improve). And compete and defense are things that can be taught and learned, unlike his size and nose for the back of the net. Also, all kids have holes in their game, so it's not like Anthony is some sort of high-risk project.

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Guest Crymson

Speaking of Anthony Mantha:


Anthony Mantha passed another checkpoint with flying colours on Saturday, creating chances all afternoon during Canada's exhibition game with the CIS Toronto Selects.

Chalk it up to ad hoc, knee-jerk, healthy skepticism, but there's always an impulse to think Mantha averaging two points per game in the Quebec League has to be too good to be true. Yet Mantha was a prime-time performer alongside Jonathan Drouin and Charles Hudon during the Subway Super Series, when Team QMJHL was the only Canadian squad to sweep its leg. With Drouin awaiting clearance after sustaining a mild brain injury on Nov. 29, he and Hudon re-channeled that synergy at the MasterCard Centre on Saturday while skating with 18-year-old Curtis Lazar.

There is no one in the CHL who can match Mantha for having a power winger's frame, 6-foot-5 and 204 pounds, and such a skill set. Just ask the guys from the other two leagues.

"Just on the spot I can't think of anyone in the WHL," said Lazar, the Ottawa Senators first-rounder who's helped Edmonton reach consecutive WHL championship series. It's cool to see him get those key attributes for himself. Just being out there playing with him I try to get him the puck and go to the net and clear space for him, As you see in the Quebec League, you give him that split-second and he can put the puck in the net."

What about the Ontario league?

"I don't think so," said left wing Kerby Rychel, who was drafted No. 19 overall by the Columbus Blue Jackets in June, one pick before the Detroit Red Wings took Mantha.

It's fitting Mantha was the 20th player drafted in 2013, since that brings to mind how hindsight is 20/20. Five months after the draft is too soon to definitively declare that a few teams would like a do-over.

Mantha was the only 50-goal scorer in the Q last season. Yet he was available to the Red Wings due to concerns about his compete level and that age-old Achilles heel with taller players, explosive speed.

On the latter count, though, every sport has its big-bodied mold-bosters. Think of 6-foot-5 Usain Bolt becoming the world's fastest human. Or the Cleveland Browns' Josh Gordon turning a short passes into long pass-and-run touchdowns at an un-Rice-like 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds. Following his selection by the Red Wings, Mantha spent his summer focusing on his skating. The strength to get more from each stride began to materialize.

"I was able to put the details in so I could take longer strides," he said. "It's really about bending your knees and finishing your strides."

The standard of care about his own end of the rink has also kicked in for the Longueuil native, whose grandfather, André Pronovost, was a four-time Stanley Cup winner with the Montreal Canadiens in the 1950s. Team Canada assistant coach Benoit Groulx has seen the change in Mantha over the past three seasons since his Gatineau Olympiques and the big man's Val-d'Or Foreurs are division rivals.

"At the beginning, he was a really offensive player," Groulx said. "But he's more responsible. We can tell when we play against Val-d'Or that he pays attention to details defensively. When you have skills like that at 6-foot-5 and you can shoot the puck, it's very valuable.

"He's got size, speed, skills, got a good shot, and he's got a very good flair around the net and it doesn't take much room for him to score goal," Groulx adds. "The older he gets and the more he learns about playing his position, the better the player he's going to be."

Foreurs coach Mario Durocher coached Canada in the 2004 world junior, when a third-period collapse — AKA the Marc-Andre Fleury meltdown — gifted the gold medal to Team USA. (Canada would win the next two golds under Brent Sutter.) Mantha notes that Durocher has got the point across that his D-zone play needs some working.

"He puts me on the penalty killing, which helps because it's defence first," Mantha said. "He told me that I need to bring my offensive game here. But I came knowing i needed to be good on the little details because one mistake can cost you a game in this tournament. So we worked on my defensive zone a lot."

Rivals such as Russia seem to mint gifted big guys with serious giddy-up. Do recall, or don't, that it was Dallas Stars rookie Valeri Nichushkin, who is 6-4 and 202 pounds, that scored the OT goal that put Canada off the podium last season. Current Winnipeg Jets rookie Mark Scheifele, who's 6-3, didn't necessarily have a bad tournament in either of the past two years. Neither did current Columbus Blue Jackets centre Ryan Johansen during the 2011 silver-medal performance in Buffalo; he was Canada's second-leading scorer. Memories are coloured by the colour of the medal.

So far, Mantha has shown he can adapt. Saturday's game was on an IIHF-regulation ice surface and it just looked like a bigger frozen canvas for him. One would never suspect that he plays half his games on Val-d'Or's smaller than regulation surface. It's all about adjusting.

"You need to put it through your head when you're outside the dots that it's a larger rink, more width, because that changes where you need to be," Mantha explained.

Meantime, with Drouin nearing a return, the possibility of a scoring line drawn mostly or wholly from the QMJHL is still in play. Sutter will surely experiment over the next week and a half before the games count, but Hudon and Mantha have a deep well of chemistry.

"We have a connection since Super Series and we need to keep it going," Mantha said.

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Anthony Mantha checks in at #17 in the consensus rankings after what was, by all accounts, a very impressive season. When the year began, Mantha was outside the top 30 for Craig Button and Corey Pronman, and outside (at least) the top 20 for Bob McKenzie. In September, Mantha definitely wasn't a player who was expected to go in the first round. But when a 6'3.5'' power forward scores fifty-five goals in seventy-six games, it's hard not to take notice.

Since that total came from the QMJHL, we have the luxury of checking out Mantha's shooting percentage. And though 15.2% is on the high side, it's not as outlandish as I was expecting, and is actually a slight regression from the 16.1% shooting percentage he had in 2011-12 when he scored just twenty-four goals. No, Mantha's big bump is mostly the result of an increase in shots. In 2011-12, Mantha had just 2.22 shots per game, but in 2012-13 he was able to push that number all the way up to 4.76 shots per game, more than doubling his previous output. In fact, Mantha's shot rate is better than either of the two top prospects in the draft, Nathan MacKinnon (4.62) and Jonathan Drouin (3.52). So even if Mantha was a little bit lucky, it really is just a little, and his shot rate alone is reason for optimism.

So is his scoring output the kind of thing that translates well to the NHL? Let's look at Mantha's comparables to find out. In this case a comparable player was someone who played his draft year in the CHL, had an adjusted goals per game rate between 0.64 and 0.79, an adjusted points per game rate between 1.18 and 1.44 (90% to 110% of Mantha's production), and was selected somewhere between 12th and 22nd overall.

Anthony_Mantha.jpg

Two busts, Bernier, and a star forward. Weird list. That there aren't very many comparables shouldn't come as much of a surprise. At this point in the draft, players who score that many goals usually just aren't available. Even among the players who are comparables, every one scored fewer goals than Mantha. His 0.72 adjusted goals per game is actually 21st among all forwards drafted out of the CHL over the last thirty years, and the guys above him are mostly pretty good company:

Anthony_Mantha.jpg

Now, Mantha's low point total stands out like a sore thumb here, but my goodness. That's a pretty good list! Of course, people really aren't worried about Mantha's goal-scoring. If they're worried about anything, it's his age. Mantha is one of the oldest players in the draft, almost exactly a year older than Nathan MacKinnon, and as I alluded to above, his 2011-12 stat line is nowhere near as impressive. But if we use those numbers to find draft comparables from the first round over the last thirty years, we'll find that players with seasons like that get drafted in the first round on a regular basis. In this case a comparable player was someone who played his draft year in the CHL, had an adjusted goals per game rate between 0.31 and 0.38, an adjusted points per game rate between 0.71 and 0.87 (90% to 110% of Mantha's production), and was selected somewhere between 1st and 30th overall.

Anthony_Mantha.jpg

A large and varied list. But since this is Mantha's Draft -1 season, we can actually see how these guys tracked with him for two years, though since the whole purpose of this is to take age into account, it probably makes sense to first cull this list by age and look only at the players listed as 18y3m or younger in the list above. As it turns out, no one qualifies as a comparable in both seasons, but I think it's still worth looking at how these players developed:

Anthony_Mantha.jpg

Although it would be great to see him higher up on this list, the only men above him are having substantial NHL careers. Corey Pronman's scouting report also delivers moderately good news in its description of Mantha as "a well-above average skater for a big man" and "an above-average passer."

My ranking of Mantha is higher than pretty much everyone else out there, and I know that. Mantha's chance of playing in the NHL at all is probably lower than some of the players I've got ranked below him, but I don't think the difference is drastic, and I think he's got a better chance of becoming the kind of player that's very difficult to replace through trade or free agency than anyone I've got below him on this list.

Next up tomorrow morning: Frederik Gauthier

Previously:

http://www.coppernblue.com/2013/6/17/4431098/anthony-mantha-comparables

This gets me excited, especially considering this was written long before this season started (June 17) where he is even better and is on pace for over 140 points.. I think we may have a superstar on our hands if he keeps progressing.

Edited by darkmanx

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Ok, Apparently was not regarded as the best Dman in his high school, but maybe the 3rd. Has a short fuse, quick to anger and get physical. Must have developed quite a bit is the word around school.

Edited by T.Low

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