The other day, while bored out of my mind during one of my university lecture, I thought to myself “How would a division II or III national team be in the NHL? So, I decided to figure it out by using two of my favourite things: NHLe (National Hockey League Equivalency) and the AIHL (Australian Ice Hockey League).

The Australian National Team, or the “Mighty Roos,” is built up completely of AIHL players. So, the first step to answering this question is to figure out the NHLe for the AIHL. To start, I did research and found that four players in history have played in both the NHL and AIHL, totaling 50 games in the AIHL and 1179 games in the NHL. Using Goals-per-Game I found the NHLe to be 0.12 which is less than half of the WHL, which sounds about right. The chart below is other hockey leagues current NHLe.

The next step is to look at the Mighty Roos current roster, which I found on Wikipedia, and find the individual players NHLe. Using all the NHLe for an 82-game season, the team would score a total of 25 goals which is 141 less than that of the 166 the Colorado Avalanche scored last season. Of course, scoring is only half of the objective in hockey, but unless the best hockey goalie in the world is hiding in Australia I think the few goals for would make them last place in the NHL.

It should also be noted that there is currently a play named Nathan Walker in the Washington Capitals system aiming to be the first Australian in the NHL. Using his AIHL numbers (only playing seven games) he should expect 1.4 goals in the NHL, but using his AHL numbers he can expect a translation to 6.5 goals, which is still bad for a NHL forward.

Nathan Walker playing for Mighty Roos

Another note, with the upcoming Olympics, the Canadian men’s team won’t be as good as Team Canada of years past due to the lack of NHL players, but I don’t think we are at risk of losing to division ll teams from Australia.