We've talked about how the NHL rewards failure by giving the best draft picks to the worst teams, and punishes the teams that actually make an effort to get to the second season. The Vancouver Canucks are an example of neither - the Canucks have made the playoffs seven times in the last ten seasons, but the Canucks are a notoriously bad playoff team because they've been unable to advance beyond the second round since 1995. Their prospect system reflects those results. Hockeys Future ranks the prospect pipeline 22nd in the NHL, and unless the Canucks' two best prospects kick into gear, that ranking is going to fall in the near future.

One useful tool to measure the depth of Vancouver's system is Gabriel Desjardins' NHL Equivalency. Gabe's methodologies are described on his translations page:

One way to evaluate the difficulty of one league relative to another is to examine the relative performance of players who have played in both leagues. Players rarely play significant time in two leagues in the same year, but they often play in one league in one year and in another the next. As long as a player’s skill level is approximately constant over this two year period, the ratio of his performance in each league can be used to estimate the relative difficulty of the two leagues.

After the jump, we'll look at the NHLE numbers for the Vancouver prospects.