#9 Mac Hollowell and Joseph Duszak
Coming in at #9 are two solid defensemen who we need more information about before we can guess begin to guess at what they might be.
Mac Hollowell is a 4th round pick from 2018 who shoots right. He started the years with the ECHL Newfoundland Growlers, and has recently been called up to the Toronto Marlies.
He recently started a game paired with Timothy Liljegren on the Marlies top pairing, but was on the bottom pairing the next game, and he’s also been scratched. I suppose the Marlies are just trying to get a feel for what he can do in the AHL. He has 13 points in 19 games in the ECHL. He has played nine AHL games this season.
Hollowell could well be a late bloomer, as he exploded in the OHL the year after the Leafs took him. In fact, in the last ten years, of the six players who scored at the same rate at the same age, five of them were picked top 20 and all made the NHL.
Joseph Duszak is two years older than Hollowell and probably doesn’t have the same ceiling as Hollowell, but he is getting more points in the ECHL, and may be much closer to the finished product.
Signed from the NCAA as a free-agent last year, Duszak gives the Toronto Maple Leafs another potentially exciting puck moving defenseman. He is over a point-per-game in the ECHL this year and was recently promoted to the AHL where he’s played six games so far.