Last week, The Athletic released the seventh edition of the NHL player tiers project. As fans have become accustomed to the past several years, the Edmonton Oilers once again top the list.While some teams, such as the Calgary Flames and Nashville Predators, are starving for franchise-altering talent, the Oilers have two of the top four MVP-calibre studs in Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl.Those two players’ placement relative to their peers is hardly up for debate. The same, however, can’t be said for Evan Bouchard.Bouchard ranked in the 2C tier for the third straight season. That puts him ahead of many outstanding No. 1 NHL defencemen, but the ranking falls well short of his fourth-place Norris Trophy finish — there are eight blueliners above him.That discrepancy is fascinating.Not because I believe our panel got Bouchard’s ranking wrong. The margins between the rungs in each tier are razor thin, and the methodology used by the panel of Harman Dayal, Thomas Drance, Sean Gentille, Shayna Goldman and Dom Luszczyszyn is more rigorous than simply asking five people to rank their favourite players. All players were evaluated analytically, starting with Luszczyszyn’s Net Rating model, then debated by the panel to work out any disagreements with the math. From there, the player list was thrown to NHL executives, coaches and scouts for further scrutiny and reordering. That combination of quantitative data and qualitative opinion means the final list is anything but a series of dart throws.Which next gen superstars jumped the highest in the NHL player tiers?The final part of that process gives us plenty of insight into the discourse around Bouchard in 2026. As I touched on in my breakout watch, even after a season in which he led NHL defencemen in scoring by 14 points in a historic 95-point campaign, he continues to be a polarizing figure.There’s no denying the production, the shot or the way he can control the flow of a game from the back end. But there is a persistent belief that Bouchard is a product of circumstance. He plays heavy minutes with McDavid and Draisaitl and quarterbacks one of the league’s most rewarding power plays. And when he makes a mistake, it can look spectacularly bad. Those mistakes have been frequent enough to spawn entire YouTube compilations. That combination has created a reputation that is perhaps unique to Bouchard in today’s NHL: a defenceman whose on-ice results are nearly unparalleled, but whose process doesn’t always look elite.The anonymous feedback gathered for the player tiers project reflected that divide. The following two quotes, included in Bouchard’s blurb, represent the glass-half-full crowd.“He just gets it done,” a coach said. “I think he’s where he should be.”“He’s a hell of a player. He’s not just a product of McDavid,” an executive said. “I think people like to criticize the loss of value that they see, but they don’t criticize the loss of value that they don’t see because somebody doesn’t do the things he does. Does he give a little back? Sure, but he creates a ton.”That’s perhaps the entire Bouchard argument in miniature. To varying degrees, both voices addressed Bouchard’s favourable environment and his unconventional methods. But they also seemed to agree his outcomes are what define him.Bouchard’s on-ice impact is on par with the best of the best. In 2025-26, he posted a 55.67 percent five-on-five expected goal share, fourth in the league among defencemen who played at least 1,400 minutes, and ahead of the three Norris finalists. He also spent 47.6 percent of his minutes in the offensive zone, which places him in the league’s 99th percentile, according to NHL Edge data. Bouchard’s best defence is a strong offensive presence.However, I’d like to open the vault on some of the material our panel left on the cutting room floor. It gives us a peek into the glass-half-empty view of Bouchard’s game, and why so many people in the sport remain skeptical of him. The criticisms rest on two main tenets: team environment and defensive inconsistency.“He has a couple of very special skills for sure,” one executive said. “But I think in that team environment and that power play, he just probably looks better than he truly is.”One scout went even further to question whether Bouchard’s impact could not only be matched, but made more efficient by another defenceman put in the same position.“I understand that the points he puts up matter, but I’m not sure that the production matches his offensive impact,” the scout said. “I just wonder if another defender put into that situation would still match that production and also drive play more effectively. Outside of the shot, which is heavy and he can sift it through traffic really well, I’m just not sure I see anything else he does as well as the other defenders in this tier.”Those other defenders include Matthew Schaefer, Miro Heiskanen, Moritz Seider, Jake Sanderson, Adam Fox, Lane Hutson and Jaccob Slavin. None of those players have anyone equal to the talent surrounding Bouchard with the Oilers. Few defencemen in NHL history have enjoyed similar luxury. The fact that either McDavid or Draisaitl was on the ice for nearly 80 percent of his five-on-five minutes in 2025-26 cannot be discounted.Neither can the fact that Bouchard is still a highly capable player without the duo. Last season, he posted a 50.77 percent five-on-five expected goal share in over 300 minutes away from both McDavid and Draisaitl. Meanwhile, that pair only earned 42.14 percent of the expected goals together at five-on-five without Bouchard. Their actual goal share was even worse at 30 percent. Since Bouchard plays more with McDavid, it’s only fair to isolate his impact away from just the captain. In that case, Bouchard posted a stronger goal share and allowed over half a goal fewer per 60 (2.5) at five-on-five.Bouchard has also proven his worth with and without his defensive partner Mattias Ekholm. The defensive stalwart was credited with helping elevate Bouchard to the level of a franchise defenceman upon his arrival from Nashville in 2023. The pair has consistently dominated the ice together, and Ekholm’s defensive acumen allowed Bouchard to unleash his full offensive potential with greater peace of mind. But their partnership has likely masked reality, leaving many to assume Ekholm is doing all the heavy lifting defensively. While Bouchard plays a higher-event style without Ekholm — both creating and allowing more goals per 60 — he actually posted a slightly higher goal share away from his partner last season.The stats say one thing, but how much does the eye test factor into Bouchard’s reputation? There’s no getting around the fact that he moves to the beat of his own drum. His skating can appear almost lackadaisical, he maintains an impressive poker face on and off the ice, and his urgency hardly ever changes, whether he’s patrolling the offensive blue line or defending a wide-open cage in a net-front scramble. His game invites a certain degree of chaos, and as a result, his blooper reel feels worse than most.The perceived lack of effort is what caught another executive’s eye.“I want this kid to f—ing try harder defensively, but he saves himself for offense,” the executive said.Try harder. That’s not a critique you hear often for a player as accomplished as Bouchard. Is it possible the perception of Bouchard is disproportionately rooted in his appearance on the ice, rather than what he routinely brings to the table for the Oilers?More recently, that has included increased time on the penalty kill. Bouchard recorded just 19 minutes of penalty kill time in 2024-25; he averaged 1:48 per game last season, second-most among Oilers defenders behind defensive specialist Connor Murphy. He wasn’t a savant, but he graded out as a serviceable defender in those minutes.Still, that same executive predicted that new head coach Mike Babcock won’t be afraid to meddle with Bouchard’s game this season: “We’ll see. This is the year. I guarantee f—in’ Babcock’s gonna be all over his ass.”How Babcock manages his No. 1 defenceman might be one of the most intriguing storylines to open the season. That goes doubly if you consider Bouchard’s penchant for slow starts, even in his career-best 2025-26 campaign. Babcock is a coach who rode Nicklas Lidstrom, one of the best defenders of all time, to a Stanley Cup with the Detroit Red Wings in 2008. Lidstrom’s nickname, “The Perfect Human,” described a blueliner whose positioning and anticipation were so precise that he was rarely caught making a mistake on camera. It sounds almost antithetical to the way Bouchard plays. Babcock might wish Bouchard could somehow grow a Lidstrom-esque defensive consciousness, but that would probably be a fool’s errand. There is an inherent danger in tampering with a process that has already proven to be elite.Perhaps it makes more sense to look at how Babcock managed a young Morgan Rielly with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Babcock turned Rielly into the Leafs’ No. 1 defender, assigning him to defend penalties and other teams’ top lines. It largely worked, as Reilly finished fifth in Norris voting in Babcock’s last full season in Toronto. But Bouchard is 26, and it’s not controversial to assert that he’s better than Rielly ever was or could be.At some point, you have to wonder whether Bouchard’s unconventional style and history of blunders cause people to undervalue what he actually accomplishes on an annual basis. This is a player who led all defencemen in postseason scoring for three straight years. He’s largely shown up in the biggest moments. Of course, a Stanley Cup would quiet many doubters who believe Bouchard’s game is not a winning style. A Norris Trophy win would also help.Even with his flaws, Bouchard commands a begrudging respect across the league. One NHL head coach put it more bluntly than anyone:“I don’t love Bouchard, but his numbers are sick, so whatever.”— Data via Natural Stat Trick