Odds of College Players Making NHL Based On What Age They Leave School

Yesterday I talked about AHL players and their transition to the NHL and since then Josh Weissbock has released more helpful information about the path from college hockey to the NHL.

Graduation rates of Fs NCAAers -> NHL by age
17: 17.24%
18: 11.55%
19: 5.86%
20: 3.42%
21: 2.64%
22: 1.38%
23: 0.82%
24: 0.55%
25: 0%

— Kevin Flynn (@joshweissbock) July 21, 2015

Those percentages are the odds a player becomes a "regular" in the NHL. Josh has that defined at 200+ NHL games played.

If you are getting a star forward out of college then odds are they are coming out before they are 20 years old IE: Jack Eichel (18), Paul Kariya (19), Jonathan Toews (18), Phil Kessel (18).

The longer a player stays in college hockey the lower his odds are of making the NHL.

Teddy Bleuger the skilled forward for Minnesota State - Mankato will be 21 years old when he finishes up his college career.

Conor Sheary, Scott Wilson, and Bryan Rust also fall into that 21 year old graduate category.

Beau Bennett was 20 when he left.

Defensemen odds aren't much greater coming from the college ranks

NCAA (Ds) graduation rate -> NHL by age:
17: 0% (SSS n=20)
18: 9.09%
19: 6.29%
20: 4.18%
21: 2.85%
22: 1.92%
23: 0.61%
24: 0.55%
25: 0%

— Kevin Flynn (@joshweissbock) July 21, 2015

Brian Dumoulin falls into the 20 year old category.


Steve Burtch made some good points on Twitter about how waiting for young players to "develop" seems like a misguided approach:

Note the success rates for age of promotion that have been posted by @joshweissbock the past few days... Players aren't getting better over time on average. If they take longer to make the NHL in the first place they probably aren't making it. Most top end skaters are guys making the NHL at 20 or earlier. Majority of NHL regulars are in the NHL by 22. Obviously there are exceptions, but I find it strange how people can see all this data pointing to youth and continuously slant towards vets. If a player takes 3-4 years to hit his stride in the NHL and teams can sort out if they are NHL level by the age of 22...

Basically he is implying that the evaluation process shouldn't take as long as it does currently. Sure, you could miss on a "late bloomer" but why cater to the outlier?

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Adam Gretz with some very interesting facts about Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin that are grounded in that silly concept of objective data

It's amazing how similar the recent playoff performances of Crosby, Malkin, Toews and Kane are individually. pic.twitter.com/B8oO61mzEt

— Adam Gretz (@AGretz) July 21, 2015

But compare their reputations over those past six years.

— Adam Gretz (@AGretz) July 21, 2015

That doesn't include the both Stanley Cup Final appearances because Adam is driving home the point that since then both Crosby and Malkin are still among the better playoff performers in hockey.

But yeah, Sid and Geno make too much and don't produce enough...

Simply put, Ray Shero is not nearly as good as Stan Bowman.

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New Hockey Hurts Podcast talks about Ryan Kesler extension, Patrick Sharp trade, Vladimir Tarasenko extension and some Penguins bottom six talk. You can find that
here


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