Blender
Registered User
- Dec 2, 2009
- 51,509
- 45,377
There is no additional factor for age, but most players who make the transition from other leagues to the NHL are younger. Obviously all players moving from the junior leagues are younger.Like i said in my other post, does NHLe take into consideration of age? Theres a difference between putting up those numbers as a 25 year old vs a 19 year old. I took Matthews draft year numbers and it gave me an NHLe of 45 points ...which is far off from what Matthews produced and what he was projected to produce. There isnt a lot of precedence of top talents coming out of the Swiss league. If a 22 year old had those numbers and came into the NHL 61 points sounds decent, but a 19 year old is different. Im not saying hes going to get 80-90 points this year, but im just saying the sky is the limit for the kid. Yeah sure, he could hit lower than 60 points, but id say the chances are just as good for higher than 70.
Everything hes done since hes been drafted has never been done before, which is why we cannot accurately predict this kids ceiling or projection.
NHLe definitely isn't perfect, and I agree the sample size for players moving from the NLA to the NHL at 18/19 is pretty small. The sample size for American players going over to the NLA for one year and then joining the NHL is probably Matthews. The sample size of players moving from the SHL to the NHL at that age is much larger though, as it has for a long time now been a breeding ground for NHL talent. I'm also not saying NHLe mandates that Pettersson will get 61 points, but it sets a reasonable expectation for him. If he gets around 61 points, he would be right in line with what could reasonably be expected of a player moving from the SHL to the NHL based on their performance in the previous season.
I also agree that it's very difficult to accurately predict his ceiling or expected production, but that is my entire point. People are posting strong positions on this and proclaiming that he will score X amount of points this year or has potential for X amount of points in his career, and I have yet to see a good analysis of where that is even coming from. So far that leads me to believe that these predictions aren't coming from anywhere rational, but an overreaction to a player that people already like and want to see succeed.
While a completely different caliber of player with different circumstances and expectations, I see it similar to the issue with making projections for Jesper Bratt that Devils fans have been struggling with. Last year he made the jump to the NHL at 19 in his D+2 season, something no 6th round pick has done in the modern era, and possibly ever. We struggled on the Devils board all season and right through to now to come to any sort of consensus on where we think he is headed, because what he has done so far is unprecedented and we have no comparables. He's often referred to as the unicorn on the Devils board for this reason. When you have no obvious comparables for a player, it makes it difficult to make accurate predictions because they have done something that hasn't been done before.