Blogger studies history to rate this year’s up-and-comers
We can all be certain the Edmonton Oilers will draft a very good player with the seventh overall pick in the NHL entry draft, right?
It’s all but certain that one of three highly rated forwards — Sean Monahan, Elias Lindholm or Valeri Nichushkin — will be available then, and there is no end to the rave reviews about each of them.
Scouts and draft experts have compared Mohanan, a centre out of Ottawa, to the likes of Eric Staal, Gabriel Landeskog and Patrice Bergeron.
Lindholm, a Swedish prospect, has been mentioned in the same sentence as Peter Forsberg. And a Tampa Bay scout raved about Nichushkin being as dominant in one tournament as Alex Ovechkin or Evgeni Malkin.
The comparisons are impressive, indeed, but alas, I’m here to suggest it’s best not to get your hopes up too high. About a third of the players selected sixth through tenth in the entry draft since 1990 have been very good players, but another third have been average players and the final third have been busts.
The odds are that one of Lindholm, Monahan or Nichushkin will not flourish, even as we might hope for the best for all of them.
At the Copper & Blue blog, writer Scott Reynolds has been taken a close looking at the scoring records of all toprated prospects to see which ones are the best bets. Reynolds starts his ranking with where the players are rated by NHL scouts and draft experts like TSN’s Bob McKenzie.
He then studies the goal- and point-scoring results of other players drafted in similar slots since the 1980s. He then adjusts the point totals for the era in which each player put up his numbers, as it was much easier to score in the 1980s than it is now. By doing all this, Reynolds comes up with a list of the most similar players to each 2013 prospect.
Reynolds has found the comparable adjusted point producers in Sean Monahan’s draft range to be Patrick Marleau, Sylvain Turgeon, Jeff O’Neill, Nazem Kadri, Scott Glennie, Brayden Schenn, Petr Nedved, Martin Lapointe, Matt Duchene and Denis Shvidki. There are some strong players there, including Marleau and Duchene, but also some busts, Glennie and Shvidki.
In compiling his lists of comparables, Reynolds, 29, a lifelong Oilers fan, has come to the conclusion that when many scouts and draft pundits talk about potential top picks, they focus on the best possible outcome, not the wide array of possibilities, some of which aren’t too rosy.
Reynolds has Lindholm ranked fifth among 2013 prospects. He thinks there’s a chance the Swede will be available when the Oilers pick. There are few Swedish players drafted so high, so fewer comparable players for a case study of Lindholm, but the names on Reynolds’ list are encouraging: Forsberg, Henrik Sedin, Markus Naslund, Nicklas Backstrom and Robert Nilsson.
Reynolds make one caution, in that the top Swedish league isn’t as strong now as it was when Forsberg, the Sedins and Naslund played, which means Lindholm’s offensive production might not translate to the NHL quite so well.
But Reynolds says as long as the Oilers take one of Monahan, Lindholm, Nichushkin or two highly rated defenders, Darnell Nurse and Rasmus Ristolainen, he will consider Edmonton’s draft day a success.