One of the big project we had this summer was to work on prospect projections. Not only for the NHL, though it attracts the most attention, but for any league or country as part of our World database project that should be online this summer.
Quick intro below if you missed it.
Basically, the model is looking at a player’s last three seasons (weighted to favor the latest one) to see where he stands right now, and compares him to precedent players from the same league, level (by league tiers), age and position, to project his future career till he is 30 years old.
https://twitter.com/Thibaud_Chatel/status/1667167085049401345?s=20
Projecting a decade of performance is long. That’s why we measured it in average expectations per season, which got some people upset on Twitter…
But the misunderstanding is that a player’s upside is very different from his average potential. Upside is a wish, when average potential is what you can expect, with ups and downs along the way.
They shall grow old
The key idea highlighted by the results, is that the farther away a player is from being in the big league he’s destined to (NHL or a top league in Europe), the less certain we are about his true potential. That is why there is no out of this world projection for a 18 years old junior, no matter how good he is.
Right now the model only has 21 players projected as Elite or top player in the NHL for their entire next Decade. Only 3 (Jiricek, Nemec and Edvinsson) are not already in the NHL. We did not plan for it, but the model is conservative by nature because history showed it that way. Imagine being a top6 forwards or top4 defenseman ON AVERAGE, for the next decade, it is already a bright future.
Level of certainty by age
One very interesting exercise was to compare a player’s projection with his actual career, at first to see if the model was good enough, then to dig into the details.
And something jumped to our eyes. Age is a HUGE factor, as a proxy for how mature a player is. This sounds obvious, but numbers are maybe bigger than what we thought.
At 16 years old, your current performance determines 56% of your future career.
At 17 years old, it goes up to 65%.
At 18 years old, it goes up to 70%.
At 19 years old, it goes up to 76%.
At 22 years old, where our model stops considering you as a prospect, your current performance explains 83% of your future career. What you see is what you’ll get.
This gets us to two key takeaways:
Developing takes time, and it is normal to be cautious over a young player, no matter how thrilled you can be about him. Of course, some players will be beating the odds, but others will fail (for many reasons). And as a player gets older, the more confident we can become about him.
This puts pressure on prospects in a weird way. To remain on top of such a model, a prospect has to improve every season, because the expectations become harder to meet as you get older and play in better leagues. In brief, it is easy to be a star in your junior league. It is something else to be a star among pros.
Again, nothing we did not know, but now there are some numbers to back that up.