I was once convinced Alexander Avtsin had all the necessary tools to make an impact in the NHL. Those were the days of judging prospects mostly by word of mouth.

Ah, youth. It wasn’t the first time I was wrong, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

Lesson learned here: if we base our projections solely on opinions, we’re bound to find several players that meet or exceed their given value. We’ll also find many more cases of players failing to reach their potential. In other words, empiricism is our friend.

As we’re given more access to brand new statistical prospect analysis tools and more relevant historical data, we’re starting to get a better idea of the odds behind every player’s NHL potential. That’s not to say we should discount scouting – it’s still and will continue to be a vital aspect to the process – but as it is in all businesses, making decisions with as much information as possible in hand is the best way to go.

The Canadiens have two prospects in particular that have driven the conversation this summer. Well, three if you count Cole Caufield and his ridiculous release, which will give NCAA goaltenders nightmares throughout the upcoming season.

The other two, Nick Suzuki and Ryan Poehling, are forwards that are right at the cusp of making an impact in the NHL.

The first question we must answer is whether they should be considered NHL-level players heading into next season.

In order to do that, we turn to Sean Tierney and Emmanuel Perry’s prospect projection tools. Wins Above Replacement value, or WAR, is a statistic that has its origins in baseball but has since been modified to project a hockey player’s value. To get more information about WAR, here’s the first of a three-part series explaining the metric.

If we take a look at Poehling and Suzuki’s projected WAR versus their probability of making it to the NHL, we can see that they both stand out as players that have a very high probability of making the NHL next year, at 88.2 percent and 78.7 percent, respectively.

Keep in mind that “making the NHL” in this chart means playing 41 games next season. It’s not a career projection and it doesn’t take NHL rosters into account, but rather, it’s an indication based purely on the statistical value of both players that they are indeed ready to take the next step.

Poehling has higher odds of making it, though Suzuki is projected to make a bigger impact once he does reach the NHL. Suzuki has a projected WAR of 0.51, whereas Poehling’s projected WAR is 0.28.

Overall projections for Canadiens prospects seem to line up quite accurately. Caufield is not going to make the team next season, and seeing how often he scored last season, there are no valid historical comparisons, so we can give the algorithm a little bit of leeway in his case. The more interesting and accurate projection will come next year.

But let’s turn our attention more specifically towards Suzuki (I will explore Poehling’s value in the near future). Now that we’ve established that Suzuki is deemed to be ready for the NHL at some point this season, what can we expect from him afterward from a production standpoint? Historical data can provide us with a sense of his future value.

To get an idea of his potential, I examined the points-per-game data from all the first-round picks who spent at least three years in the CHL between 2008 and 2016.

And here are their results from year to year.

OK, I’ll admit it, it’s a mess. And it’s probably the perfect example of a chart that, at a glance, gives little to no information. But it’s just the first step. We need to weed out the players that produced much more and much less than Suzuki throughout his CHL career.

However, before we do that, we can establish a few things. First off, the thick blue bar in the middle is Suzuki’s points-per-game pace, which was 0.6 in his rookie season, 1.47 in Year 2, 1.56 in Year 3 and 1.59 in his final season.

Oh, and that purple bar at the top of the chart? It’s Connor McDavid, standing out as ever.

Suzuki is closer to the top than the bottom of the pack, but he’s also much closer to the middle than either extreme, which should perhaps temper the most ambitious expectations surrounding the Canadiens prospect.

The main finding here is that there seems to be a clear divide between the players that managed to score at least 1.5 points per game by their third year in the CHL compared to those that did not.

Here’s the list of most of the forwards that failed to achieve a 1.5 PPG scoring rate:

Lawson Crouse, Jake DeBrusk, Nick Merkley, Jake Virtanen, Nick Ritchie, Brandon Perlini, Josh Ho-Sang, Kerby Rychel, Emile Poirier, Hunter Shinkaruk, Tom Wilson, Matt Puempel, Austin Watson, Zack Kassian, Jordan Caron, Carter Ashton, Justin Bailey, Kyle Beach and Tyler Ennis, Quinton Howden, Michael McLeod, Logan Brown, Jared McCann, John Quenneville, Julien Gauthier, Curtis Lazar, Sean Monahan, Frederik Gauthier, Jason Dickinson, Radek Faksa, Henrik Samuelsson, Mark McNeill, Phillip Danault, Zack Phillips, Joey Hishon, Brett Howden, Nazem Kadri, Scott Glennie, Peter Holland, Cody Hodgson, Rickard Rakell, Zach Boychuk, Greg Nemisz, Bo Horvat, Brendan Gaunce, Scott Laughton, Jordan Eberle, Phillipe Paradis and Conner Bleackley.

And here are most of the forwards that hit the 1.5 PPG mark by their third year in the CHL:

Mitch Marner, Timo Meier, Travis Konecny, Anthony Beauvillier, Anthony Mantha, Jonathan Drouin, Pierre-Luc Dubois, Sam Steel, Connor McDavid, Ryan Strome, Mathew Barzal, Leon Draisaitl, Sam Bennett, Robby Fabbri, Dylan Strome, Max Domi, Alex Galchenyuk, Mikhail Grigorenko, Mark Scheifele, Sean Couturier, John Tavares, Brayden Schenn, Taylor Hall, Emerson Etem, Jonathan Huberdeau and Nick Suzuki.

Though I chose a fairly arbitrary cutoff line, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that Suzuki finds himself in the wrong group.

There are a few exceptions on both sides, notably Danault, Monahan, Kadri, Eberle, Horvat, Rakell and DeBrusk in the first group. But for the most part, if your prospect isn’t producing at a 1.5 points-per-game rate by his third year in the CHL, there are decent odds he will not end up playing in your top six for a sustained period of time at any point in his career. There are even better odds he will be quickly forgotten.

It’s also worth noting the two groups also share fairly distinctive average draft positions. Most of the players in the first group were drafted in the bottom half of the first round and their average draft position was 19th, whereas the vast majority of the players who made an impact were drafted in the top half, with an average draft position of ninth.

So the sharp drop off in the first round of the draft everybody refers to each year expresses itself even before those prospects have reached the pros.

So we’ve established Suzuki is in the right group, but there’s way too much data involved to get a good idea of the best comparable scoring rates in the CHL. Since he played four seasons, shared between Owen Sound and Guelph, we can start by cutting out all the players that only played three seasons (we’ll get back to them a little later). Then we can eliminate the players who don’t align with Suzuki’s points-per-game pace.

Here’s what the chart looks like when we narrow it down to the five closest comparables. For the record, Max Domi was also in the mix, but he just missed the cut.

There’s a good mix of talented players, though there certainly are some underwhelming players, notably Hodgson and Laughton. With that in mind, if Suzuki can emulate Danault or Kadri’s NHL production, the Canadiens will be in good shape.

Now let’s bring the players that only spent three years in the CHL back into the fold. This particular grouping shines a much brighter light on Suzuki’s potential.

Other than Etem, who still managed to play 173 games in the NHL, you’re looking at a list of very talented NHL players, though that’s to be expected given that most of those players were fast-tracked to the NHL. However, they certainly match quite well to Suzuki’s points-per-game pace.

And finally, once we combine the closest comparable CHL careers from both the three and four-year group, we get our final list.

Huberdeau didn’t follow a similar path, though he did end up producing at more or less the same rate as Suzuki in his final year. Couturier’s production was almost identical, as was Meier’s. Laughton and Danault ended up very close to Suzuki in their fourth year, but unlike Suzuki, it took them four years to get going.

Judging by their CHL production from year to year, the closest comparable Nick Suzuki is . . . *drumroll please* . . . Nazem Kadri, a back-to-back 30-goal scorer who has put up 387 points in 561 games.

Final Word

There’s no guarantee Suzuki will ever match Kadri’s eminently respectable production in the NHL. Hell, there’s no guarantee Suzuki will make it to the NHL.

Nonetheless, we can state with confidence that all available signs point to a player that will have a very good NHL career, though the numbers suggest it probably won’t be an elite NHL career. His performance in the OHL playoffs last year seems like the outlier in that sense.

Of course, the points-per-game results include a bevy of variables in every case, whether it be date of birth, style of play, team strength, usage, trades or health. But given the amount of data we’re working with, it’s fair to assume that Suzuki is well above average when it comes to NHL prospects.

There should be some concern in regards to his production plateauing after his third year in the CHL. That said, his paltry improvement from Year 3 to Year 4 could be explained by a late-season trade and by the fact Suzuki was instructed to play a style that is more conducive to NHL hockey following his arrival in Guelph.

As for his destination next season, there are very few examples of leaving a high-end prospect in the minors too long, but there are endless horror stories about graduating them too early. If you need examples, the general managers that drafted most of the players listed in the first group mentioned earlier in the article would be happy to provide them.

While there’s a lot to be hopeful about in Suzuki’s case, there’s still a lot of room for growth. He didn’t finish his CHL career with the kind of overall production that would immediately translate into top-six ice time in the NHL, which is where you want a guy like Suzuki to be, but a year or two under Joël Bouchard’s tutelage in Laval is a reasonable time frame to prepare him for heavy minutes with the Canadiens.

(WAR prospect chart via Sean Tierney, Statistics via HockeyDB )

(Photo: Vincent Ethier/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)