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The Canadian major junior leagues (OHL, WHL, and QMJHL) are undoubtedly the most important sources of talent for the NHL Entry Draft. We have covered those leagues extensively to date in Up And Coming. Other talent pools of utmost importance on draft day are the NCAA and certain European leagues, and we will address those in due time. The Projectinator will need to be modified before use in those areas, however, so for now we press on to other North American leagues, where the differences from the major junior leagues should be those of relative quality, and not of intrinsic character.
This week we'll look at the USHL, the top junior league in the United States. While certainly of lower quality than any of the Canadian major junior leagues, the USHL does have one distinct advantage in recruiting players over the CHL: you do not lose your NCAA eligibility by playing in the USHL. The NCAA considers the OHL, WHL, and QMHL to be professional leagues due to the small stipends players receive for their living expenses. As such, any player who plays in one of these leagues is considered to be a professional and is ineligible for NCAA play. The USHL (and Canadian Junior A leagues) do not have this issue, and as such, college-bound players obviously reject the CHL in their favor.
The first step in applying the Projectinator to the USHL, of course, is to build a database of USHL players who were first draft-eligible between 1990 and 1998. With that data ready, we simply apply the Projectinator calculations and play around with them in order to determine the quality multiplier that produces the best fit, to get the 10YE scores as close as possible to the 10Y scores. As it turns out, the system sees USHL forwards as being about 65% of the quality of the better CHL major junior leagues, and defensemen as being about 80% of that quality. There are too few goaltenders of the proper age in the sample to draw any real conclusions about that position.
First we'll have a look at the top 20 forwards in the database, ranked by 10Y score. Note that I have not presented any draft data for these players. Players in the USHL are generally looking to go on to the NCAA, and under old eligibility rules, players drafted at this age would generally lose their NCAA eligibility. As such, players would often not opt in to the draft as 17-year-olds, but rather wait until the following season to be drafted. This makes the draft data of little use, since we can't tell whether a player wasn't drafted because the scouts passed him over, or because he did not opt in to the draft. Several of these players were drafted in their second year of eligibility, so it's clear at least some of them did not opt in when they could have.
Player Year 10Y 10YE
Cole, Erik 1997 .69 .34
Ferraro, Peter 1991 .53 .33
Ferraro, Chris 1991 .51 .37
Wilson, Landon 1993 .48 .36
Swanson, Brian 1994 .43 .38
Hall, Adam 1998 .42 .37
Walby, Steffon 1991 .39 .21
Strachan, Wayne 1991 .39 .39
Mikesch, Pat 1991 .38 .22
Swider, Kevin 1996 .38 .22
Johnson, Ryan 1994 .37 .31
Carter, Shawn 1991 .36 .13
Ricci, Angelo 1990 .36 .35
Panzer, Jeff 1996 .35 .39
Suk, Steve 1991 .33 .35
Berens, Sean 1994 .32 .38
Hoogsteen, David 1993 .32 .16
Berg, Reggie 1995 .31 .45
Morrison, Justin 1997 .30 .24
Of these players, only Erik Cole, Lanson Wilson, Adam Hall, and Ryan Johnson have had real NHL careers, and only the Ferraro twins, Brian Swanson and Kris Kenady have played in the NHL at all. It's a group that has a few fairly good players at the top of the list, but gets thin very quickly.
The highest rated player according to the system is Reggie Berg at .45 10YE, which would probably put him somewhere in the third round if all players were drafted in order based on the 10YE statistic. Other players the Projectinator suggests should have had decent careers are Jason Sessa (1995, .39 10YE, .30 10Y), who had some good years in the lower minor leagues , and Mike Naylor (1991, .39, .21), who played one season in the ECHL after college before retiring.
Moving on to the top 10 defensemen:
Player Year 10Y 10YE
Tanabe, David 1998 .60 .18
Leopold, Jordan 1998 .59 .26
Corvo, Joe 1995 .52 .26
Finger, Jeff 1998 .42 .18
Naumenko, Nick 1992 .41 .30
Stafford, Garrett 1998 .36 .31
Campbell, Ed 1993 .36 .32
Janik, Doug 1998 .34 .29
Adams, Akil 1992 .32 .20
Brindley, Ryan 1994 .31 .32
Again there are only a few NHLers in this group. David Tanabe, Jordan Leopold, Doug Janik, Joe Corvo, and Jeff Finger have played in the top league, though Corvo's career really only got going beyond the 10Y mark. The defensemen the Projectinator likes best are Dan Peters (1996, .46 10YE, .28 10Y), Glen Mears (1990, .37, .27), and Ryan Bencurik (1995, .36, . 21), who had varying degrees of success in the minor leagues. Peters is a relatively small player, which could be one reason the scouts shied away, but at any rate, his career was nothing special.
The Projectinator does less well with the defensemen than it did with the forwards, even though it sees blueliners coming from the USHL to be of higher quality overall than the forwards. It misses the few that have had good professional careers, similar to the results for forwards, but pegs the second and lower tiers of players very well. This possible pattern of missing the top players is worth keeping an eye on as we examine other lower-tier leagues. It may simply be a fluke here, or it may be indicative of something in the system that makes it less applicable to lower-level leagues. Perhaps there's something in the nature of the statistics of good players playing against lower-quality competition that disguises their value from the Projectinator. We'll keep that in mind as we go along.
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