LastWordArmy
Registered User
Every sport has a few teams that can’t seem to get out of their own way. In hockey, the Ottawa Senators wear this crown, but the Buffalo Sabres are giving them a run for their money. All the negative press around the Sabers recently got me looking at their painful draft record and wondering, how much different might the Buffalo Sabres look today if they had drafted by something simple like NHLe instead of picking the players they did?
NHLe vs. the Buffalo Sabres Drafting
What is NHLe?
NHLe is a simple yet powerful concept that means NHL equivalency. The general idea is simple, how much is a point in any league worth compared to a point in the NHL. It can also be called a league’s “translation factor” because it roughly translates scoring in any given league to NHL scoring. For example, the KHL has an NHLe of 0.63. This tells us 10 points in the KHL are worth about 6.3 points in the NHL. Exact estimates vary, but this post will use CJ Turtoro’s “Network NHLe” translation factors.
This becomes a useful tool for evaluating prospects. A constant challenge for scouts is adjusting for the quality of various. For example, it can be difficult to intuitively adjust for the difference between the OHL and KHL. With NHLe, those scouts can get a reasonable comparison of two prospects scoring rates, no matter what leagues they play in.
The NHLe Method
With that being said I wanted to test, would an “NHLe method” have out drafted the Buffalo Sabres historically? The idea is simple. For each Buffalo Sabres pick, simply select the player with the highest NHLe per game played among the available drafted prospects. If the Sabres did select the highest scoring player available, don’t change the selection. Then compare the NHL outcomes of my method’s selections to the Buffalo Sabres picks from 2007-2013.
For this post, our selection method will have many drawbacks and one advantage. The first drawback is that I have not accounted for age. Adjusting for age can be crucial for prospects because a year or two represents a large chunk of their lives. So, in 2007 for example, Patrik Zackrisson will be the most desirable prospect, not Patrick Kane. Kane’s NHLe was slightly lower than Zackrisson, but Zackrisson was a year and a half older. As a result, nobody ranked Zackrisson nearly as high as Kane. Our NHLe method will not be able to account for this and would pick Zackrisson first overall in 2007 if given the chance.
The next drawback is the NHLe method will have no contextual information. Points per game are largely a function of five things,
The third drawback of this method will be no positional adjustment. This method will never draft a goalie and will have a 0 percent chance of selecting high upside picks like John Gibson. Additionally, it will be unable to discern the difference between defencemen and forwards. So take Ryan Ellis for example. He scored at a historic rate for a draft-eligible defenseman in 2009 OHL season. This gave him the statistical profile of an elite defensive prospect. Despite this, the NHLe method would still take a 20-year-old forward in his draft plus 2 season over Ellis if the forward outscored him, even just slightly.
The final drawback is incomplete information. The NHLe method only gets to use a player’s scoring rate from their primary league. So, imagine a player split time between the USDP and USHL. The NHLe method will only get to use a player’s statistics from the league they played in most. The lone exception being (usually with KHL defenders) where prospects played in 2 leagues but produced 0 points in one league. Here I used the player’s output in the league where they scored.
The only advantage our NHLe method will have is knowing which players got drafted. Rather than sorting by all available prospects like teams had to do, the NHLe method will only select from players who were drafted that year. This means the method cannot select the Artemi Panarin‘s of the world but probably helps lower the false positive rate of high scoring players. All in all, it should be the single advantage for the NHLe method. This is an unrealistic advantage but it should absolutely not allow a “sort by points per game” method to beat an actual NHL team’s drafting record, but let’s see what the differences are.
NHLe vs. the Buffalo Sabres Drafting
The Article continues here
https://lastwordonhockey.com/2020/06/30/buffalo-sabres-drafting-vs-nhle/
NHLe vs. the Buffalo Sabres Drafting
What is NHLe?
NHLe is a simple yet powerful concept that means NHL equivalency. The general idea is simple, how much is a point in any league worth compared to a point in the NHL. It can also be called a league’s “translation factor” because it roughly translates scoring in any given league to NHL scoring. For example, the KHL has an NHLe of 0.63. This tells us 10 points in the KHL are worth about 6.3 points in the NHL. Exact estimates vary, but this post will use CJ Turtoro’s “Network NHLe” translation factors.
This becomes a useful tool for evaluating prospects. A constant challenge for scouts is adjusting for the quality of various. For example, it can be difficult to intuitively adjust for the difference between the OHL and KHL. With NHLe, those scouts can get a reasonable comparison of two prospects scoring rates, no matter what leagues they play in.
The NHLe Method
With that being said I wanted to test, would an “NHLe method” have out drafted the Buffalo Sabres historically? The idea is simple. For each Buffalo Sabres pick, simply select the player with the highest NHLe per game played among the available drafted prospects. If the Sabres did select the highest scoring player available, don’t change the selection. Then compare the NHL outcomes of my method’s selections to the Buffalo Sabres picks from 2007-2013.
For this post, our selection method will have many drawbacks and one advantage. The first drawback is that I have not accounted for age. Adjusting for age can be crucial for prospects because a year or two represents a large chunk of their lives. So, in 2007 for example, Patrik Zackrisson will be the most desirable prospect, not Patrick Kane. Kane’s NHLe was slightly lower than Zackrisson, but Zackrisson was a year and a half older. As a result, nobody ranked Zackrisson nearly as high as Kane. Our NHLe method will not be able to account for this and would pick Zackrisson first overall in 2007 if given the chance.
The next drawback is the NHLe method will have no contextual information. Points per game are largely a function of five things,
- Player talent
- Quality of Teammates
- Total Time on Ice
- Total Time on the Powerplay
- Luck
The third drawback of this method will be no positional adjustment. This method will never draft a goalie and will have a 0 percent chance of selecting high upside picks like John Gibson. Additionally, it will be unable to discern the difference between defencemen and forwards. So take Ryan Ellis for example. He scored at a historic rate for a draft-eligible defenseman in 2009 OHL season. This gave him the statistical profile of an elite defensive prospect. Despite this, the NHLe method would still take a 20-year-old forward in his draft plus 2 season over Ellis if the forward outscored him, even just slightly.
The final drawback is incomplete information. The NHLe method only gets to use a player’s scoring rate from their primary league. So, imagine a player split time between the USDP and USHL. The NHLe method will only get to use a player’s statistics from the league they played in most. The lone exception being (usually with KHL defenders) where prospects played in 2 leagues but produced 0 points in one league. Here I used the player’s output in the league where they scored.
The only advantage our NHLe method will have is knowing which players got drafted. Rather than sorting by all available prospects like teams had to do, the NHLe method will only select from players who were drafted that year. This means the method cannot select the Artemi Panarin‘s of the world but probably helps lower the false positive rate of high scoring players. All in all, it should be the single advantage for the NHLe method. This is an unrealistic advantage but it should absolutely not allow a “sort by points per game” method to beat an actual NHL team’s drafting record, but let’s see what the differences are.
NHLe vs. the Buffalo Sabres Drafting
The Article continues here
https://lastwordonhockey.com/2020/06/30/buffalo-sabres-drafting-vs-nhle/
