Stacey looks at CCHL prospects by team. Analysis....(Part one)

How does your prospect pool look?

When I look at my list of prospects I often wonder how they compare to other teams.  Have I picked better forwards than I have defense or vice-versa?  I must be honest, I don’t follow the NHL nearly as much as I once did (I don’t know how I could ever complete with the me that reviewed NHL games to find secret good players, looking at you Kyosti Karjalainen and Oleg Petrov!) and I have relied on websites and reviews and Matt Young telling me that a prospect he is giving me is actually good even if no one agrees. 

I wanted to get a better understanding of my teams’ strengths and I wasn’t sure how to do that.  I like playing with numbers and I can do some crunching, so I thought about using a variety of websites to take their player assessments and then somehow merge them to get a single number for each player.  What happens below is step one of many, or maybe just the one step. 

I used Dobber (and their rating system) to analyze the top 200 forward prospects and the top 50 defensive prospects. The caveat to this is that the analyze is only looking at points impact, it won’t be scoring a defensive d-man all that high, even though we know they are important.  A second caveat is that I am not actually sure what a prospect means in this case, as there are some players already playing in the NHL.

Essentially what was done was an excel sheet was created with the top players and then matched them up against our prospects and team roster pages.  I then grouped the ratings into CCHL teams to give a bit of a summary of the prospect ‘power’ that is available for each team.  Most teams had players in the top 200 forwards and defense but there were some absences as well, most notably Hilo Wildcats do not appear in either list.  There is also a list of undrafted players, some of those undrafted players are similar in prospect level to the prospects on some of the CCHL teams (at least according to Dobber).

Forwards –

Of the 200 top prospects there were 18 players that had not been drafted into the CCHL (from what I could tell with my automated matching and manual review), I wonder if they will get drafted this year?

CCHL Team	# of Prospects	Prospect ‘Power’ (sum of the scores)	AVG rating	Max Rating
Parry Sound Orrsmen	19	1130.9	60	80.8
Siberia Icecats	20	1083.8	54	76.1
Victoria Ronin	19	1054	55	71.9
#Undrafted	18	851.2	47	60.9
Sudbury Miners	12	687.4	57	83.7
Dartmouth Lakers	13	682.6	53	65.4
Wisborg Donuts	10	529.3	53	71.9
Fort Erie Falcons	10	513.3	51	66.9
Long Island Express	9	489	54	71.8
Dayton Musicmen	9	450.3	50	80.1
Springfield Isotopes	8	448.9	56	69
Seattle Reign	7	391.5	56	76.2
Calgary Chinook	6	321.7	54	78
Portland Owls	6	319.4	53	65
Niagara Falls Thunder	6	302.9	50	72.3
Reykjavik Puffin	6	296	49	58.9
Capeside Loons	5	263.7	53	63.7
Las Vegas Aces	4	247.4	62	82.9
Minnesota Norsemen	5	234.6	47	52.7
Hamilton Tigers	3	148.4	49	57.9
Georgetown Millers	3	140.9	47	51.6
Gillam Sharks	2	118.4	59	73.2
Total	200		54

The data seems to point to Parry Sound having not only a large group of prospects but also a highly rated group.  There is one team with more prospects, but their average rating is lower which says to me that they may have a mix of top level and some lower level talent in their pipeline.

I was disappointed to see Springfield lower in the list than Dayton as Bill said he thought he had moved his best prospects already, the only joy I can take from this is that my players seem to be slightly better rated on average.

Does this list kind of speak to the understanding of your team?  How does it differ?

I will look at defense next, which is a smaller list but then group the two together to see if it says anything else.

Cheers,
Aaron
SPR