For some inexplicable reason, I’ve long wondered if Denmark’s or Norway’s top professional hockey league was better. I’m on record pondering this from over three years ago, which was met with exactly zero responses.

Denmark’s Metal-Ligaen and Norway’s Get-Ligaen are roughly equivalent leagues in hockey’s hierarchy by reputation. The leagues are a similar size with similar schedules, and employ a similar mix of European league veterans, career North American minor leaguers going abroad for the first time, and developing young players sourced from superior hockey nations.

While there’s no great method for evaluating which league is better, I wanted to figure out a translation factor between the two leagues. Translation factors have been used to calculate rudimentary metrics like NHLe, which measures how a player’s NHL point production compares to their point production in their previous league. (Here’s a good summary on NHLe, similar metrics, and the methodology.) I’ve done a similar exercise here, focusing in on how scoring rates change for players moving between Metal-Ligaen, Get-Ligaen, and HockeyAllsvenskan, Sweden’s second tier.

Thanks to the new premium stats filter on EliteProspects, it’s easy to grab players who have played in these leagues. I then trimmed the list to only those who played in two of them in consecutive seasons or the same season. I also restricted the sample size to: 1) the last ten years and 2) players with a minimum of ten games played in both leagues.

Adjusted Scoring Rates

I’ve also adjusted each players’ scoring rate to normalize for different goal-scoring environments as they move from league to league. For example, let’s use Nicolai Meyer moving from Denmark in the 15/16 season (1.62 PPG) to HockeyAllsvenskan in the 16/17 season (0.65 PPG).

Unadjusted, Meyer retained 40% of his scoring rate. But there were 6.1 goals scored per game in Metal-Ligaen in 15/16 and only 5.2 goals scored per game in HockeyAllsvenskan in 16/17–85% as many goals. To account for this, I’ve adjusted down Meyer’s 15/16 scoring rate to 1.39 PPG — 85% of his unadjusted scoring rate. (Essentially, 1.39 PPG is what we’d expect him to produce if the leagues were of equal quality, but in HockeyAllsvenskan’s lower goal-scoring environment. Instead, he retained 47% of that expectation.)

The Data

#1. Let’s start with players who have moved between the two leagues in question. Players going from Denmark to Norway retain all of their production. Players going from Norway to Denmark retain just 92%.

Advantage: Denmark, slightly