Not everything has gone as planned for the Winnipeg Jets. After making the playoffs for the second time in franchise history, and first time since the move, the team is still without a playoff win and appear to be a long shot for playing postseason hockey two years in a row.

Not everything is dark and dreary; there are some good things going on in Jets Nation. One thing that always tends to cheer up fans is prospects, as they represent future hope and potential.

Let’s look at how the Jets prospects have developed using NHL Equivalent scoring.

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Whenever I deal with NHLEs, I always start with a little advisory notification: NHLEs have huge flaws. If you are new to NHLEs, they attempt to equalize scoring over the many leagues into NHL scoring currency. Each league has an exchange rate by comparing the scoring at both levels for players who move from that league into the NHL.

For example: the average OHL player who plays in the NHL the next season tends to score at 30 per cent their previous season’s point per game pace.

The flaw is in the fact that players who move from their own league to the NHL are not in the same situation for each league. Most CHL players range from elite talents to the merely exceptional 18-20 year olds. Most NCAA graduates who move into the NCAA are a bit older, and the talent range is therefore also slightly larger. Pro-leagues though tend to have older players as the primary source of data, and they can often be fill-ins for depth roles. Then there is the AHL, which often has replacement level injury substitutes constitute as a large bulk of the inputs.

That said, it is still a quick and easy way to look at progress, provided one keeps in mind the biases inherent in the model.

Here are the Jets current prospects, alongside some of their older ones to give some context and weight to the numbers.

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Players are listed in order of draft year and pick number (Axel Blomqvist as a UFA is treated as an 8th round pick).

Random Notes:

* Right away, wow, Kyle Connor is having himself one hell of a season. He currently resides second in NCAA scoring and points per game, while also holding the highest goals per game pace. If Connor completes his season with his current point pace, he will be the highest scoring NCAA U20 player over the last decade after Jack Eichel.

* While the Jets did have quite a few more earlier picks, it is interesting to see that the Jets have focused more and more on scoring talent as the years have progressed. This should lead to fuller prospect cupboards and higher drafting efficiency, which leads to cheap depth options allowing for teams to spend more on veterans (such as Dustin Byfuglien and Andrew Ladd).

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* Brendan Lemieux has had quite the scoring jump, and that is a good sign for the Jets. However, to also keep us grounded, we should note that Scott Kosmachuk carried a fairly similar developmental curve as well.

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Random Notes:

* While scoring carries a smaller role for defenders than it does with forwards, it is still very much a strong indicator of those who will make the NHL successfully.

* Sami Niku, who plays in the Finnish Liiga, represents one of the possible flaws with NHLEs. NHLEs ranks him as the lowest scoring defender of the Jets prospects; however, the PCS model places him somewhere around the same range as Jan Kostalek. This makes him an interesting prospect to study as a statistical analysis, to look at how we may be able to improve either of these models.

Random Notes:

* Here we combined seasons. This helps the NHLE model by reducing shooting percentage inflation, but hurts the models ability to catch fast fallers or risers.

* We also have given five years of data, since five years after the draft we have a pretty good idea what the player is and will be.

* While Connor is on pace for having comparatively the best prospect scoring pace for the Jets, by combining years we see how Nik Ehlers s still on pace for being the Jets most dominant forward scoring prospect, although Nic Petan still has a tonne of promise as well.

Random Notes:

* There is a lot of hype surrounding Tucker Poolman, and some if it is deserved as he has a lot of tools that could make him quite successful. The excitement though may need a bit of grounding though. Poolman is very much an older prospect and his scoring is not as impressive when taking that into account. Still has a tonne of promise though.

* I do always enjoy looking at this draft and reminiscing many of the “draft expert” talking heads discussing Jacob Trouba’s limited offensive upside.



