This Friday, June 21st, 217 NHL prospects will be drafted with the hopes of becoming the next Sidney Crosby, Jamie Benn, or Evgeny Kuznetsov. Teams are faced with the difficult task of projecting young adults to the NHL, with some of those players coming from leagues that don’t even track second assists, and others coming from the highest levels of hockey. Analysts, Scouts, GMs, etc. will scour eliteprospects and hockeydb, checking out how many points a prospect produced in each league, and then try to use their small DB of memory to remember what NHL players also played in that league, and how they performed at the NHL level. Instead of using our 0.1 GB RAM human brains, we will use our 16GB RAM MacBook Pro to reference historical data necessary to translate point production across leagues for 2019 NHL Draft Eligible prospects.

Information on the methodology behind how we developed our Hockey Translation Factors can be found in this article. Note that these factors are not exactly NHL equivalence, as developed by Rob Vollman. Generally, the factors are in-line, but they use a different methodology with the purpose of capturing how players translate from league-to-league outside of the NHL.

For a quick refresher on translating a specific player’s point production after deriving a league’s factors, we simply take the age-adjusted points per game for each league and season, apply the league translation factor calculation, and weight the player’s league and seasons by recency, games played, and league prominence. For example, Jack Hughes played multiple seasons (2018 and 2019) in the United State Development Program and one short season (tournament) in the 2019 World Championships (WC). Hughes’ 2019 season USDP is weighted higher than his 2018 USDP season (recency). For 2019, the WC is one of the highest levels of competition so it gets a bump over the USDP (league prominence), but he only played 6 games in the WC vs 75 games in the USDP (games played). The overall effect would weight the point production for USDP in 2019 higher than his production in the 2019 WC.

The table below contains 569 Draft Eligible prospects for 2019, and their translated Points Per game at Age 23/24 in the NHL. Note that these are mean projections, assuming a roughly league average NHL playing time (at Even Strength, on the Power Play, and on the Penalty Kill) for all prospects. If there is a player missing that you would like to see, please reach out.

No surprises at the top, with Jack Hughes and Kaapo Kakko leading the way. Interestingly, in addition to the number one overall, the USDP program grabs spots 3-7. This is probably due to a combination of: (1) a good class with high-end talent in Hughes and Caufield, and (2) a weak Major Junior (OHL, WHL, QMJHL) class. Speaking of Major Junior, it was surprising at first to see Arthur Kaliyev ahead of the more highly touted Dylan Czechs and Kirby Dach. However, after further investigation, you realize that Kaliyev outproduced both players while being a good 6 months younger. Czechs and Dach likely rank higher because of a better physique, and, supposedly, more hard-working attitude on-the-ice. A couple other interesting names that project better relative to mock-draft and public scouting rankings are Bobby Brink (USHL), Nils Hoglander (SHL), Robert Mastrosimone (USHL), and Alex Newhook (BCHL). On the flip side, some players that project worse from a translated Points Per Game perspective are Tobias Bjornfot (SHL), Albin Grewe (SuperElit/SHL), and Jameison Rees (OHL).

Anybody that has played hockey knows that points don’t tell the whole story, but there are other ways to measure productivity. We take a crack at capturing additional information outside of point production in our NHL Draft Models that we will release in the ensuing days leading up to the draft. Be sure to stay tuned!