I don't think you understood me correctly. It's a difficult league to come into and just light on fire immediately. Lander didn't produce those numbers in his first AHL season...of course you can light it up when you've been there for a long while, that's self-explanatory, but there's an adjustment period for almost every player that comes into that league. Many, many top prospects have completely sunk in the AHL after being real successful junior players and as have already been evidenced, tons of real good NHL players never sniffed PPG in AHL. It's really not about points in that league.
Yeah, I would defer to you or others who watch the league more than I do. I try to catch as many Oiler AHL affiliate games as I can, but as an example I was shocked to learn that Sharp was three seasons in the league. And the bolded would lead you to think that a player of Sharp's caliber would have been dominating the AHL by his third (partial) season. Yet not.
I sure realize that there are players like Hunt (six assists over a recent two game span) who for whatever reason can't translate it to the NHL. And just looking at points doesn't tell the whole story as to whether the player is actually improving or not. I think we agree there. Imo it depends on too many factors to say a player scoring x points at a certain age is going to fail/succeed in the NHL.
For example not only was Lander scoring at a better clip every year, he was learning to take draws (won 16/22 NHL draws tonight, including 9/10 o-zone draws) and playing on the top PK unit as well (3:48 on the NHL PK tonight, most on the team, most trusted by the coach in the role). None of that stuff shows up in the point columns, and not every guy who spends a couple seasons in the AHL learns to do that stuff properly. I suspect that Sharp spent his AHL time learning to do it well. Hopefully Lander becomes something similar.
