New Perk: 2023 Prospect Cards (Patreon)

The draft is coming up and you know what that means: prospect visualizations are ready to go.

There are over 5,300 2023 NHL Draft prospects and 677 NHL-affiliated prospect cards included here, all updated using 2022-23 stats.

What these cards show is based on NHL Equivalency, a model in which scoring rates in different leagues and at different ages as well as other factors such as size are harmonized and analyzed using historical data to estimate the likelihood of a prospect being able to establish himself in the NHL full time (by playing over 200 games as an above-replacement player) and become one of the better players in the league (top 18th percentile of wins above replacement). If there's one thing we've learned about the draft in the past 30 years, it's that being able to produce well at lower levels is extremely important, even for players who end up as defensive specialists or bottom six players. Look at a prospect ranking from 15 years ago and you'll see a lot of "can't miss offensive top line" forward prospects who became third line role players and a lot of safe bet fourth liners who struggled in the AHL.

These metrics are of course imperfect, and a low rating doesn't doom a player to a poor career. But they do provide extremely valuable context for what a player's pre-NHL production actually implies about their chances of sticking and succeeding in the league and also give us some valuable perspective about just how uncertain it is that prospects pan out like we hope they do.

So with that said, here are the links to access these long-awaited cards.

• If your last name starts with A-E, click here.
• If your last name starts with F-J, click here.
• If your last name starts with K-O, click here.
• If your last name starts with P-T, click here.
• If your last name starts with U-Z, click here.

Next up, I'll be updating the WAR Roster Builder, putting out microstat team cards, and building some 2023-24 projection cards with microstats as well.

Cheers,

Jack