Young Guns and the NHLe: Ya Feeling Lucky?

At a Glance

• The Road from Prospect to NHL Player
• Predicting Success for Prospects
• Usefulness of NHLe

Introduction

We've covered the incoming NHL prospects for the past couple of draft seasons (you can check out the Draft 25 coverage here), and to say the least it's been eye opening. It's opened our world to a global cohort of prospects that are trying to make it to the NHL.

It's also got us tracking prospects a little earlier in the season – like now. And yeah, you may be wondering what's wrong with us, but come on Gavin McKenna (one of the top prospects for next year's draft) making $700,000 to play in college?

It's a new day my friends.

The Road from Prospect to NHL Player

Every season, NHL teams and their analytics departments scour the junior, college, European, and minor leagues hunting for players who might someday make an impact on their rosters. We at Data Punk Hockey are nowhere near at the level of these amazing people, but we do a fraction of an analysis for our NHL Draft series, and we use the Elite Prospects Draft Center and their annual guide to do it.

But the gap between being a top prospect and being an NHL regular is vast — and unfortunately many never cross it. They get drafted and end up in one of the NHL's affiliate leagues.

To compete in the NHL, prospects face:

• A frenetic pace that requires a physical presence on the ice. Skaters must adapt to faster transitions, tighter checking, and more lethal forechecks.
• More constrained space on the ice. Mistakes that might be survivable in junior or college get punished in the NHL.
• Narrower opportunities on the roster and across the league. Even talented youngsters can get buried behind veterans or stuck as third-line or bottom-pair options – and visibility for your performance is very high across the league.
• The need for consistency and durability in their performance and results. Injuries, mental fatigue, and travel all weigh heavily on young players.
• A significant adjustment to the role they have to play at the NHL level. Many prospects must adapt to lesser roles (penalty kill, third-line starts and pairing, defensive zone starts) before their full skills emerge in offensive minutes.

So, can you predict how well a prospect will do at the NHL level?

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Predicting Success for Prospects

Building your data pipeline for your analyses and predictive models at the NHL is tough enough; you need access to a predictable source with your own code/models running on a daily basis with, ideally, at least 3 seasons worth of player and team data (at the game detail level). This is tough to get; data sources are disparate in terms of data coverage even at the NHL level. It's even more sparse (and disconnected) through the minor affiliate leagues.

With some tenacity and time, you can build an integrated data pipeline that could take hockey data from the minors and affiliate leagues and run predictions on who could make it in The Show. But, to do this you need a translation layer. Enter an equivalency score called the NHLe (or NHL Equivalency measure).

NHLe is a statistical tool used by hockey analysts to estimate how productive a player might be in the NHL based on his performance at lower levels.

In simplified form, NHLe uses historical translation factors — for example, points scored in the AHL or European pro leagues might be scaled down by a factor (say by a factor of 0.3 to 0.4) to project NHL-level point production. Similarly, defensive metrics or shot rates can be scaled. What makes this tricky is that each league is different, thus has its own NHLe factor.

For example, let's take Gavin McKenna, a good-looking Canadian boy from the seriously Great White North, and take his 2024-2025 stats (an impressive 129 points in 56 games) from the WHL and restate them through the NHLe.

We would typically build the NHLe translation into a Python or R layer, but to try this out at home right now, you can head on over to Dobber's Frozen Tools and with a couple of clicks get your answer. In McKenna's case, using his last year in the WHL he would have the potential to score 57 points at the NHL.

But, let's take one more step to gauge the company McKenna's keeping. Here is a snapshot of left wingers who produced between 55 and 60 points in the 2024-2025 season. Yeah, some pretty big names here.

Now, can success in the minors and affiliates that is calculated through the lens of the NHLe lay the path for an incoming prospect? Short answer: no. As mentioned above, young guns will face innumerable challenges on and off the ice. So, NHLe is by no means gospel, but it’s a more systematic way than guessing or relying on hype alone.

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Usefulness of NHLe

All told, NHLe is a helpful tool — but not a magic wand. With the EP data, we've used the NHLe along with the other statistics we can source as a way to understand the well-roundedness of an incoming prospect.

That said, here are things that we look out for with and around the NHLe:

1. You have to consider the context around the metric. For example, NHLe treats scoring proportionally without consideration for ice time, line mates, special teams, and zone starts.
2. It loosely translates across skater, defenseman and goaltender. Translation factors differ by position and by league. A forward’s scoring NHLe is not directly analogous to a defenseman’s translation of ice control, or a goalie’s .910 save rate scaling.
3. You run up against smaller samples of data. Many top prospects have limited games in junior or pro leagues. Overreliance on NHLe from small samples can misrepresent a player's success in the NHL.
4. NHLe is great for point projection, but doesn’t capture shutdown defense, gap control, position, hockey IQ, leadership. A prospect might “underperform” NHLe but provide huge value in other ways.
5. It's not rated (or weighted) against other variable curves, such as age. Prospects evolve — early translation might understate their peak. Some players accelerate over 2–3 seasons and surpass initial NHLe projections.

Given the right statistics, you might get some of above. Failing statistics, you can also reference the Elite Prospects Annual Draft Guide for deeper scouting reports.

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Final Thoughts

Prospects bring promise, hope, and raw talent. However, becoming a reliable NHL contributor is often about rounding margins — decisions, play in tight situations, health, attitude, and opportunity. With NHLe-based projections, we can give those tools a numeric anchor, but not a guarantee.

This coming week, we'll spotlight three new entrants in the NHL that embody different trajectories.

1. Matthew Schaefer
2. Michael Misa
3. Ivan Demidov

These are three players that all had very successful non-NHL careers but are stepping into very different roles and teams in different situations.

You'll see watching how each navigates the adaptation — handling role, pace, and consistency — is as much part of the story as their raw stat line. More importantly, we'll see how NHLe represents their potential and transition into the NHL.

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