The Buffalo Sabres lost the draft lottery on Saturday and to the extent that they only ever had a 20-percent chance of winning it, general manager Tim Murray was mega-bummed to settle for second place.

He was so disconsolate about not getting Connor McDavid that his exit interviews at the lottery came with the deadened intonation of a hostage reading a list of demands.

“I'm disappointed for our fans,” he said of the people who cheered for his team to lose games down the stretch. Later, when it probably dawned on him that he was, ahem, settling for Jack Eichel, he also added “We're happy with second; two franchise-changing guys in this draft.”

Franchise-changing indeed. I can't speak to the quality of Connor McDavid personally, having seen him zero times live and probably only six or seven on television, but what I can tell you about Jack Eichel is that there has probably never been a draft-eligible freshman in NCAA hockey of his caliber. It might not, in fact, even be close.

Throughout the year I was crunching some numbers for College Hockey News, and that included taking the time to do the obvious comparison: Eichel vs. Paul Kariya. The latter, of course, is famous for scoring 100 points in 39 games as a freshman for Maine back in 1992-93, but hockey in general was much higher-scoring back then. So it made sense that one would try to adjust for the era-related factors to see which was actually more dominant relative to their competition. The answer was Kariya, very narrowly, but that 25-75-100 points line includes — and has always included — nine points in two exhibition games against Canadian teams. (The reasons why this is the case, and all the math, are explained here.)

So if you take those out, which you should because Eichel doesn't get that benefit, it seems that the future Sabre had the most dominant age-18 season in modern NCAA hockey history. He scored 26-45-71 in 40 games against players as much as seven years older than him. It's an astonishing feat.

But that, of course, doesn't factor in how good Connor McDavid is and was and will be for the next decade and a half at least. There has, in a lot of scouts' minds, been significant separation between No. 1 and 2 for a while now. They see McDavid as The Next Sidney Crosby. They see Eichel as The Next I Dunno Steve Yzerman Or Something. Both are going to probably end up as all-time great players, but you'd rather have Crosby than Yzerman. And it's not a slight against Yzerman — or Eichel for that matter — to say that.

What we really need to consider, then, is the impact such a player is likely to have at the NHL level as a rookie. Fortunately, Rob Vollman long ago concocted a way to measure NHL equivalencies for non-NHL leagues like the OHL and Hockey East, where Eichel and McDavid each played.

Obviously neither Eichel nor McDavid would approach their output in their draft year if they'd played it at the NHL level, and there is in fact a sharp drop-off from the quality of the best league in the world to these development leagues. A point in Hockey East, for example, is probably worth about 0.33 points in the NHL, and a point in the OHL is probably worth 0.3.

By this measure, we arrive at these NHLe numbers:

View photos

Now, these numbers are not hard and fast by any means, but they certainly give you a good idea of how to project things. (And indeed, the Hockey East NHLe number isn't exact; since conference realignment, it's gotten harder to score in that conference, meaning that Eichel's numbers might even be improved from about 18-30-48 for a season he started at age 17.)

Story continues