NHLEs for the Leafs' 2010 Draft Selections

I hadn't planned on writing this post, but after the Leafs made their draft picks on Saturday, I thought it'd be of interest to look at where these prospects are in terms of offensive production, adjusted to the NHL level, to follow up on the posts I'd done for the AHL, NCAA, Junior, and European prospects who the Leafs held rights to during the 2009-10 season. In the following table, names are listed by order of selection. NHL Equivalencies are unavailable for Sondre Olden and Petter Granberg, who played in Sweden's junior leagues. Their stats below were taken from their games in the highest level Swedish junior league (the Under-20 Super Elite league). Daniel Brodin also played 20 games in the junior league, scoring 7 points in 20 games. Up in the Swedish Elite League, he scored 5 in 30 while averaging just 7:41 minutes of icetime per game.

Statistics for '10 Leafs draft picks, click to view at full-size:

All ages as of January 1, 2010 (as according to the Desjardins method). Of course, all players 18th birthdays must be before September 15 in order to have been eligible for the draft.

Brad Ross was selected with the 43rd overall pick, acquired from Chicago in exchange for the rights to NCAA forward Jimmy Hayes. Ross, age 17, would score merely 5 less points than Hayes, age 20, for every 82 NHL games according to NHLE. Hayes may be a huge specimen at 6 ft 5 and 210 lbs, but does not play much of a physical style that people hope for from a big man. On the other hand, Ross is well known to be a very feisty agitating type, a quality well indicated by his 203 PIMs and 11 fighting majors during the regular season. This was the major factor in the Leafs' pulling the trigger on the deal.

McKegg, with a projection of 0.38 points-per-game and 30 points per 82 games, ranks just behind Kadri, Ruegsegger, D'Amigo, and DiDomenico in production amongst those who didn't graduate to the NHL level in '09-10. Carrick, Brodin, and Nicholls are at the lower-end, as you'd expect of later-round selections.

Keep in mind that we're only looking at projected point-production here, this is not necessarily an indication of a prospect being ready for the big time. Obviously there are other facets of the game that players must work on before they can crack an NHL or even AHL roster. Also, NHLEs will not always accurately predict a player's scoring rate, so take those numbers with a grain of salt.

NHL Equivalencies for Junior prospects of 2009-10

Finally, here are the NHL Equivalencies and other statistics for this years' junior prospects. NHLE is the projection of the point-per-game that the player would post at the NHL level, and /82 is simply the number of points they're projected to score per 82 games. Basically, they tell us what amount of point production we can reasonably expect from these players next season, but it should be understood that these projections won't always closely match their actual output.

Statistics for '10 Leafs junior prospects, click to view at full-size:

OHL - Kadri, Mitchell, Ryan, Blacker, Devane, Smith
QMJHL - DiDomenico, Champagne, Stefanovich, Paradis
USHL- Knodel

Nazem Kadri, widely considered to be the Leafs top offensive prospect, is projected to score at nearly half of a point-per-game pace for 39 points over a full 82-game schedule.

Right-winger Dale Mitchell (along with teammate and fellow Leaf prospect Kenny Ryan) contributed to the Windsor Spitfires 2nd consecutive Memorial Cup victory. He should stick with the Toronto Marlies for this upcoming season. BTW, note that the NHL Equivalencies for overage juniors are nicked down further than the 18 and 19 year olds (see this chart, which you can find within Gabriel Desjardins' series of articles on NHLEs at BtN).

DiDomenico played too few games for us to get a real solid read on him, as he spent most of the year rehabilitating his injured leg (he suffered a broken femur in a 2009 playoff game). However, after scoring 22 points in 12 regular season games upon his return to action, he continued to tear it up in the playoffs as he scored 21 points in 14 playoff games.

Champagne looks like a guy with potential to become a respectable 3rd-line checking centre, but the Leafs passed on signing him (for reasons mostly unknown to the public), and so he is eligible to be selected again in the entry draft. Reports are that he is a poor skater at the junior level, but otherwise I couldn't guess at why the Leafs have passed on him nor can I say if they made the right decision or not.

Phillipe Paradis was selected at #27 overall by the Carolina Hurricanes in last year's draft and subsequently traded to Toronto for Jiri Tlusty. Paradis is reputedly a tenacious checker with lower offensive upside than Tlusty, which is why some people aren't fond of the deal, but the former Leaf prospect and 1st round pick hasn't yet lived up to his offensive projections at the NHL level. Tlusty was projected to score at a 0.49 point-per-game pace this season, based on his production in the AHL last year, yet he merely scored 6 points in 20 games and his Pt/GP pace at the AHL dropped off from last year's. Management simply feels that Paradis has a better shot of becoming a future bottom-six forward for the team than Tlusty did of becoming a top-six forward (top-six being defined as mostly skilled/scoring forwards, and the bottom-six being made up of grinders/defensive forwards).

Eric Knodel, at 6 ft. 6 in. and 225 pounds, was the biggest prospect in the Leafs system in 2009-10. The US-born defenceman will play NCAA hockey at the University of New Hampshire next season.

The QMJHL is the only one of the three Canadian major junior leagues to publish shots on goal and faceoff data, but I had to go through the game-by-game logs to count up the Power-Play Assists produced by each Quebec league player.

Supplemental Statistics

	Shooting			Power-Play			Faceoffs
Player	SOG	S%	S/GP	G	A	P	FO	W%	FO/GP
Kadri	-	-	-	11	24	35	-	-	-
DiDomenico	27	25.9	2.3	1	6	7	20	25.0	1.7
Champagne	212	17.9	3.3	15	15	30	1579	58.5	24.3
Mitchell	-	-	-	4	11	15	-	-	-
Stefanovich	174	14.4	3.3	8	16	24	194	49.0	3.7
Paradis	176	13.6	2.8	9	11	20	48	47.9	0.8
Ryan	-	-	-	3	2	5	-	-	-
Blacker	-	-	-	4	12	16	-	-	-
Knodel	91	3.3	1.8	3	10	13	-	-	-
Devane	-	-	-	0	1	1	-	-	-
Smith	-	-	-	0	0	0	-	-	-

Note that Mikhail Stefanovich's shooting percentage this past season was a hefty drop from the 23.6 % rate from the year before (when he scored 49 goals), but virtually identical to the 14.7 % posted in his first major junior season. And that Chris DiDomenico took very few draws. He'd been terrible in the faceoff circle throughout his junior career; his lifetime faceoff winning percentage in the Q is 42 %. Perhaps he'll move permanently to the wing upon joining the pro ranks?

NCAA Prospects of 2009-10

Pictured is Jerry D'Amigo, one of the Toronto Maple Leafs' top NCAA prospects, celebrating a goal during the 2010 World Junior Championships. Selected in the 6th round (158th overall) of last year's Entry Draft, D'Amigo went on to score at close to a point-per-game clip in his first year at college and won the ECAC's rookie-of-the-year award. As well, he won gold with Team USA at the WJC, contributing 12 points in 7 games.

The freshman D'Amigo was one of nine Leafs' prospects who played NCAA hockey over the past season. Below are their basic statistics and NHL Equivalencies in 2009-10. Brayden Irwin and Simon Gysbers were undrafted but signed on with the Leafs organization and joined the pro ranks late in the season, while Chris Peluso was acquired from the Pittsburgh Penguins in exchange for a 6th round pick in 2010.

Statistics for '10 Leafs NCAA prospects, click to view at full-size:

Tyler Ruegsegger wrapped up his college career by rebounding from something of a down year, mainly piling up more assists to produce what projects to 34 NHL points (per 82 games). He also greatly increased his point-production outside of the Power-Play, too (Ruegsegger scored just 9 points in Even-Strength/Short-Handed situations throughout the 2008-09 season; this past year he scored 24). Next year he will turn pro and the Leafs have until August 15 to sign him, and Chris Peluso too, if they wish to retain their rights.
Jimmy Hayes stepped up his production in his sophomore season and helped the Boston College Eagles win the NCAA championship.
Matt Frattin returned from suspension in mid-season and played fairly well, showing some improvement. It is apparent that he got some more Power-Play minutes, as he scored just 1 point less than he did in 2008-09 when he'd played 42 games, and he recorded 20 shots on the PP this year while he'd taken 22 during the previous season. Frattin took one less shot in total than he did last season despite playing in 18 fewer games. This wasn't just due to increased PP time; he took 2.5 shots per game at Even-Strength in 2009-10, up from the 1.5 taken the year before.

You can find the number of PP and PK shots for Frattin and his teammates at North Dakota's statistics page. Various college hockey team sites include similar breakdowns and they are mostly the source for the statistics posted in the Supplemental Stats table below. Included are shots, power-play scoring, and faceoff data for the college boys. Faceoff stats were unavailable for Irwin and D'Amigo and I had to go through their game logs to count up their power-play assists, a relatively easy task as USCHO.com gives you the manpower situation for each of their goals and assists right in the game logs. D'Amigo's game-by-game also shows the type of penalties he got, but Irwin's doesn't. Anyway, the assortment of roughing, elbowing, boarding, and unsportsmanlike penalties taken by D'Amigo seem indicative of a chippy player.

Supplemental Statistics

	Shooting			Power-Play			Faceoffs
Player	SOG	S%	S/GP	G	A	P	FO	W%	FO/GP
Ruegsegger	109	14.7	2.7	5	11	16	639	52.3	16.0
D'Amigo	140	7.1	4.0	3	10	13	-	-	-
Irwin	106	14.2	2.7	7	4	11	-	-	-
Hayes	123	10.6	2.9	3	3	6	280	51.1	6.7
Frattin	82	13.4	3.4	3	3	6	30	53.3	1.3
Gysbers	101	5.9	2.7	3	5	8	1	0	0.0
Winnett	77	7.8	1.8	3	4	7	253	43.9	5.8
Peluso	39	2.6	1.3	0	2	2	-	-	-
MacWilliam	17	0	0.4	0	0	0	0	0	0

NHL Equivalencies for the Marlies of 2009-10

Last week, I took a look at the Toronto Maple Leafs' overseas prospects and projected how they would score at the NHL level, using Gabe Desjardins NHL Equivalencies. Now we cross over to North America to review the Leafs' prospects (and, I suppose, pseudo-prospects), in the AHL. It's certainly more names here than on the Euro list, however, practically all the noteables went on to play with the Maple Leafs or played the majority of the season in junior and then joined the Marlies after their teams were eliminated from the playoff picture. In Dale Mitchell's case, he was sent back to the OHL after 9 games at the beginning of the season.

Toronto shared their farm team with the Anaheim Ducks this past season and this led to a bit of disarray with the Marlies roster. The pugilistic Andre Deveaux led the team in scoring and the Marlies, like the parent Toronto club, had lackluster goaltending for a good chunk of the year (veteran Joey MacDonald put up a .893 save percentage over 36 games).

BTW, that's Darryl Boyce (born in Summerside, PEI) in the picture above, playing for the Maple Leafs during a preseason game. He played all of 3 minutes and 20 seconds in the NHL during a regular season game a few years ago before separating his shoulder on a hit. I also watched him play for the University of New Brunswick Varsity Reds as they won the CIS championship one year.

All players listed below are 26 or younger and on the Leafs reserve list or were junior players that they hold rights to. All ages are as of Jan. 1, 2010. NHLEs are Point-per-Game averages adjusted to the NHL level and /82 projects the amount of NHL points scored per 82 games. For the AHLers, I have adjusted NHLE's for age as well as league.

Statistics for '10 Leafs AHL forward prospects, click to enlarge:

Statistics for '10 Leafs AHL defence prospects, click to enlarge:

Stalberg and Caputi scored at similar rates in the NHL, only slightly less than what their NHLE's this year suggested. Christian Hanson scored at a lower rate in the NHL... with the Marlies, he scored 42 % of his points on the PP, but didn't score a single PP point with the Leafs. Bozak struggled with the Marlies and had to deal with a bout of swine flu during his time there along with an ankle injury.
Rookie AHLers (25+ games) were Greg Scott, Robert Slaney, Alex Berry, and Richard Greenop at forward, and Juraj Mikus and Keith Aulie on defence. Scott scored at an ever-so-slightly lower rate than he'd been project to out of the WHL (NHLE in his last junior season was 0.26, 21 points per 82 games) while Slaney and Berry were big disappointments. The latter two forwards spent some time in the ECHL as well.

I've also included shots-on-goal and PP data for each Marlie player. At least the AHL site now includes shots-on-goal data within their skater statistics page but it still takes some hunting to find out how many PP assists each player had.

Supplemental Statistics

	Shooting			Power-Play
Player	SOG	S%	S/GP	G	A	P
Caputi*	174	13.2	3.2	11	4	15
Stalberg	127	9.4	3.3	4	4	8
Hanson	82	14.6	2.2	4	9	13
Paradis	7	0	1.8	0	0	0
Brent	70	18.6	2.2	3	0	3
Bozak	75	5.3	2.3	1	8	9
Scott	118	8.5	1.7	2	3	5
Deveaux	130	12.3	1.8	6	3	9
Foster	75	12.0	2.5	3	3	6
Boyce	37	5.4	1.9	1	1	2
Hamilton	109	14.7	2.3	2	2	4
Giliati	50	6.0	2.0	1	1	2
Mitchell	15	13.3	1.7	1	0	1
Mikus	122	4.1	1.8	3	10	13
Blacker	5	0	0.8	0	0	0
Slaney	24	0	0.7	0	1	1
Gunnarsson	15	0	1.3	0	2	2
Aulie+	39	5.1	0.8	0	0	0
Oreskovic	92	2.2	1.2	0	0	0
Greenop	13	13.3	0.4	0	0	0
Rogers	91	5.5	1.4	1	0	1
Berry	71	4.2	1.3	0	1	1
Gysbers	31	0	2.2	0	1	1
Devane	1	0	0.5	0	0	0

* - Luca Caputi only played for the Wilkes-Barre Penguins in the AHL.
+ - Keith Aulie's statistics include those put up with both the Abbotsford Heat and the Toronto Marlies.

Prospects in Europe, 2009-10

Korbinian Holzer, defenceman for the DEG Metro Stars of the Deutsche Eishockey League (DEL, the top professional league in Germany) these past three years, signed a two-year, two-way contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs organization today. Pension Plan Puppets has details on the signing, and more links to peruse if you want to get the low-down on this prospect.

Holzer was selected in the 4th round of the 2006 Entry Draft, taken with the 111th pick overall. The now 22 year-old defenceman has had a fairly noteworthy season, posting career-high numbers in the German league and earned a spot on the German national team at the 2010 Winter Olympic games. The Leafs brought over defencemen Carl Gunnarsson and Juraj Mikus last fall, and now the German blueliner, too, will cross the Atlantic ocean for the 2010-11 season.

Holzer was one of four European Leafs' prospects in the system. The tables posted further down in this article displays their statistics from this past season in their respective pro hockey leagues, including their NHL Equivalencies, a projection of the points they would produce in the NHL. Once again, I shall point out that we are indebted to Gabriel Desjardins of Behind-the-Net for his work in coming up with these league translations. I had once tried to cook up a magic number myself that estimates how AHLers would produce when called up to the big league, back in either 2002 or 2003 when minor-league vet Paul Healey had a favourable stint with the Leafs (he even got some icetime with Mats Sundin, as just about anyone who laced a pair of skates in Toronto did during the Pat Quinn era). I only looked at a few handfuls of players and concluded that AHLers produced anywhere between 30 to 70 % of their minor-league production at the NHL level depending on age. Of course, Desjardins' study drew from a lot more players than I did...

The NHLE's are valuable for helping shed light on what we should expect from our prospects offensively, and although there are limitations to the method, they have proved fairly accurate for the Leaf players who've jumped into the NHL the past few years as my previous article at this blog demonstrates.

Statistics for '10 Leafs Euro prospects, click to enlarge:

The NHLE column shows the point-per-game projection at the NHL level for each player, and the /82 column is simply projected NHL points per 82 games.

Holzer is projected to score 18 points if he plays the entire season with the Leafs. In comparison, Carl Gunnarsson was projected to score 20 points (per 82 games) in his last season overseas and this year, having made the big-time, was on pace to score 29.
The pesty Leo Komarov has one more year on his KHL contract as does his teammate Dmitri Vorobiev (who, in the past, has shown little interest in coming over). Vorobiev, who once looked like the Leafs best Euro prospect, saw his production drop sharply along with his icetime as he played behind former NHLers Alex Zhitnik, Danny Markov, and Karl Rachunek. Jerome Flaake had a bit of a setback too.

The supplemental stats table shows additional numbers that may be of interest.

Supplemental Statistics

	Shooting			Power-Play			Icetime
Player	SOG	S%	S/GP	G	A	P	TOI/GP
Komarov	78	6.4	1.7	3	-	-	14:40
Holzer	73	8.2	1.4	3	6	9	-
Vorobiev	46	4.3	0.9	1	-	-	16:05
Flaake	44	6.8	1.1	0	0	0	-

The KHL also publishes faceoff data. Komarov took 307 faceoffs over the season (5th most on Dynamo Moscow) and won 51.8 percent of them.

Rookies and Sophomores of 2009-10

Here is a look at the offensive progression of Leafs' rookies (Bozak, Stalberg, Gunnarsson, Caputi*, and Hanson) and sophomores (Grabovski, Kulemin, Mitchell, and Schenn) over the past three seasons.
EqPt/GP stands for Equivalent Point-per-Game-Played average, which is a projection of how the player would produced at the NHL level according to Gabriel Desjardins' terrific league translations. Pts/82 is the number of points that the player was projected to score over 82 NHL games.
The following players, since making the NHL, have mostly produced at close to the same rate as they'd been projected to at the minor/college/junior level or in the European leagues. Plus, if you combine Bozak and Gunnarsson's wildly divergent 2009-10 NHL/AHL numbers, you'll get a number closer to their EqPt/GP of the previous season.
Ages are as of January 1, 2010.

Rookies:

TYLER BOZAK, Centre

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	21	NCAA	41	0.34	-	28
2008-09	22	NCAA	19	0.50	-	41
2009-10	23	AHL	32	0.29	-	24
2009-10	23	NHL	37	-	0.73	60

VIKTOR STALBERG, Wing

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	21	NCAA	39	0.24	-	20
2008-09	22	NCAA	39	0.41	-	34
2009-10	23	AHL	39	0.40	-	33
2009-10	23	NHL	40	-	0.35	29

CARL GUNNARSSON, Defence

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	21	SEL	53	0.13	-	11
2008-09	22	SEL	53	0.24	-	20
2009-10	23	AHL	12	0.07	-	6
2009-10	23	NHL	43	-	0.35	29

LUCA CAPUTI, Wing

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	19	AHL	66	0.49	-	40
2008-09	20	AHL	66	0.33	-	22
2008-09	20	NHL	5	-	0.20	16
2009-10	21	AHL	54	0.41	-	34
2009-10	21	NHL	23	-	0.35	29

CHRISTIAN HANSON, Centre/Wing

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	21	NCAA	47	0.19	-	16
2008-09	22	NCAA	37	0.34	-	28
2008-09	22	NHL	5	-	0.40	33
2009-10	23	AHL	38	0.38	-	31
2009-10	23	NHL	31	-	0.23	19

Sophomores:

MIKHAIL GRABOVSKI, Centre

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	23	AHL	12	0.70	-	57
2007-08	23	NHL	24	-	0.38	31
2008-09	24	NHL	78	-	0.62	51
2009-10	25	NHL	59	-	0.59	48

NIKOLAI KULEMIN, Wing

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	21	RUS	57	0.48	-	39
2008-09	22	AHL	5	0.00	-	0
2008-09	22	NHL	73	-	0.42	34
2009-10	23	NHL	78	-	0.46	38

JOHN MITCHELL, Centre

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	22	AHL	79	0.30	-	25
2008-09	23	NHL	76	-	0.38	31
2009-10	24	NHL	60	-	0.38	31

LUKE SCHENN, Defence

Season	Age	League	GP	EqPt/GP	Pt/GP	Pts/82
2007-08	18	WHL	57	0.14	-	11
2008-09	19	NHL	70	-	0.20	16
2009-10	20	NHL	79	-	0.22	17

* - I just realized that Caputi will still be considered a rookie next season, as long as he plays 25 games or more. To qualify as a rookie according to NHL rules, the player must play in 25+ games throughout the season, and not have played at least 25+ games the year before nor in 6+ games in each of any two preceding seasons.