Quote:
Originally Posted by Vulcan
Well NHLE is fun to look at but it doesn't take into account the many players who don't make the NHL fresh out of college, so this only takes into account the elite few who do make it...
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But that's just it. It also doesn't take into account the thousands upon thousands of players who don't make the NHL fresh out of the other lower level leagues as well. The number only takes into account the elite from every league who happens to have the special opportunity to play in the NHL, whether they came out of the AHL, the OHL, the KHL, or Elitseren, or wherever else they came from. There is no unique distinction to be made here for the NCAA.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vulcan
The other thing I don't care for is the rating of the NCAA versus the AHL. Many of the players called up from the AHL aren't scorers, so that skews the rankings, while NCAA players going straight to the NHL mostly aren't grinders.
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Evidence?
Think about this. The NHLE
is an average compiled from the available data. That's all. What doesn't appear at a glance in the figure are the many outliers that you have alluded to, but what you are also failing to note is that some of those outliers are also on the extreme high end. I mentioned him in this discussion before, but Crosby scored 102 points in his rookie NHL season, and his NHLE predicted an output of around 60 points. There are lots of reasons for the massive discrepancy; he is just an exceptionally skilled player, but also benefitted from playing that first season with a handful of hall of fame players. But further, his number coming out of juniour was also skewed likely by the fact that he had so badly outgrown the QMJHL. He was SO dominant that his pts/game output in juniour clearly did not show how good he really is. There are only so many chances that a player will have to score in any given game, and for those players who are exceptional—like Crosby—their level of play will eventually plateau as a result.
I would suggest that this similarly holds true for Gaudreau. He is so much better than every other player in college, that his skill is literally wasted at that level. Think about this: it was a common practise all season long for Jerry York to play his top line early, and to sit them for the third period and even in the second once BC started to run up the score (which was often). Gaudreau got very little power play time this year, since York also seems to have preferred to give other players more opportunities, especially in those (many) games in which BC was very comfortably in front. How much is Gaudreau's own NHLE skewed by the fact that he very likely should have smashed that 2.0 pts/game mark with regular shifts in the third period, and power play time?