You haven't convinced me why 2000 is an inflated projection. Would love to hear your argument.
The drafted players are 22-23 years of age and we are coming up on 600 man games played already.
If Virtanen and McCann only play until the age of 30 and only average 70 games a season we're up to around 1750 NHL games.
Then you have Thatcher Demko to account for. Even if he's just a career NHL backup you're looking at 250 odd games. Ndver mind him developing into a starter.
So you're betting Tryamkin never comes back to the NHL and Gustav Forsling never has a career from here on out to have a safe probability to stay under 2000 man games.
Not to mention where the numbers go if McCann and Virtanen play their 31, 22, 33 year old seasons etc...
Sure. But there's also the possibility that one of them suffers a serious injury, misses an entire season or worse, has to retire at 27 ala Cody Hodgson. The odds of that happening are low but have to be factored into a mean projection. 875 NHL games is a LOT of games, especially for players who aren't top-line scorers. Just look at the quality depth guys from the Canucks 2011 team and see how many of them never got there: Samuelsson, Lapierre, Higgins, Torres, Hansen; these guys were all very good 3rd line type players and all were done after around 600 games. Even a guy like Burrows who had a one-of-a-kind remarkable career barely got to the 900 game mark.
I think you are just really underestimating how hard it is to play that many games. Realistically you would probably set the individual over/under at about 650 for those two players. That's 1,300 combined, which means that even if you get 500 games from Demko (Cory Schneider has 379) it STILL leaves you 200 games short, and you're banking on getting that from Forsling (21 games this season) and Tryamkin (0.)
I mean, maybe I was overly harsh but it just seems like way too high to set as a *median.*
It does raise an interesting question though. What is the average number of games played for players who had X games through their age Y season, where X is Jake Virtanen's games played and Y is, uh, his age.
I'll get back to you on that. Well, back to me since I asked it. I'll get back to me on that.