This is part three of five breaking down the players selected by the Blue Jackets at the 2016 NHL Entry Draft. You can view the previous profiles here:
Calvin Thurkauf
Peter Thome
The Blue Jackets got one of the biggest steals in the draft when they selected Russian born winger Vitali Abramov 65th overall. Abramov spent this past season playing for the Gatineau Olympiques in the QMJHL. It was his first season in North American and he absolutely killed it. He’s an undersized player at 5’9 but had no issues adjusting to the rigors of the QMJHL game. He scored 38 goals and dished 55 assists, his 93 points finished tied for 5th in the league. Among first time draft eligible players Abramov trailed only Pierre-Luc Dubois.
I was really high on Abramov entering the draft. Over at
Buckeye State Hockey I posted my
top 91 draft prospects and ranked Abramov 16th. He’s an incredibly smart player who can stickhandle in a phone booth. He may be the best stickhandler in the entire draft. I saw Abramov at the CHL top prospects game and was impressed with how well he controlled the puck. He uses his hands well to avoid sticks and is very shifty, helping him weave between defenders. I noted that he shoots the puck well and generated scoring chances.
This was a common for Abramov this season, per
ProspectStats.com he finished fourth in the QMJHL with 171 dangerous shots, and eighth with 2.714 DS per game. Despite his size he is able to get to the front of the net and into the slot. Take a look at his shot heat map, courtesy again of Prospect Stats, below. Almost all of his shots are in that home plate/scoring chance area.
This is remarkable and bodes very well for his future success. Steven Burtch wrote a
great piece over at Sportsnet in May, looking at shot distribution in OHL shooters. He found that in the OHL you can have success shooting from low and medium danger areas as the goalies stop far fewer of those shots than the ones in the NHL. He adjusted for these goaltender effects and went on to show how the best shooters/scorers in the OHL would perform in the NHL. He concluded with this:
The skaters we would see as the most comfortable in transitioning to the pro game are those who are most comfortable shooting from high traffic areas in junior.
Burtch’s post was focused on the OHL but I would imagine similar results would be found if this study was redone using QMJHL and WHL players. Abramov was deadly at getting into those high traffic areas which definitely helped make the adjustment easier to the QMJHL and will help him even more as moves up into the pro game in the future.
Further to the point, just looking at Abramov’s scoring relative to others over the years and you can see he looks primed for future success. Per
EliteProspects, since 2000 there have been 14 players under the age of 18 who have scored at least 1.45 points per game in the QMJHL. Abramov is obviously on the lower end of that list but ranks very favourably to Claude Giroux (1.49), Ales Hemsky (1.47) and Jakub Voracek (1.46). That is a quick rudimentary look at it, and going deeper with the Draft Expect Value tool, it paints an even brighter picture.
DEV found seven comparable players, five of which went on to be successful, including Tyler Ennis, Derek Roy, Bryan Little, and Jeff Skinner (we won’t bother mentioning his fifth comparable). Abramov was given an expected pick value of fourth overall and a 66.67% chance of making the NHL. DEV also pegs Abramov as someone who could be an impact player, expecting him to score 0.58 points per game in the NHL or about 47 points over 82 games.
Using NHL Translation factors and NHL Equivalencies, Abramov is already playing close to that level. NHLe was a method created by Gabriel Desjardins, to estimate what a player would have scored if he had played in the NHL. Rob Vollman has continued to study NHLe’s and translation factors and recently found that the translation factor for a player going from the QMJHL to the NHL was 0.26. To figure out a player’s NHLe you simply multiply their scoring rate by the translation factor for their league. So for Abramov who take his 1.48ppg and multiply it by 0.26 and you get 0.3848, meaning Abramov would have scored about 39 points in the NHL this season.
For more information on NHLe’s, you can check out Vollman’s work
here.
This is significant as Byron Bader over at NHL Numbers
wrote this article on finding elite players late in the draft. He found that of the 100 elite players to come out of the late part of the draft (after round two), since 1980, 53% of them hit an NHLe of 30 before turning 19. Another 45% hit an NHLe of 40+ prior to age 20 and 75% of the 100 hit 40+ at some point prior to reaching the NHL. Abramov is already in that first bucket and just missed the second two. This season he should be well over a 40 NHLe. Again he is looking like a really strong player and showing just how crazy it was he fell to the third round.
Vitali Abramov is the type of player people are going to look back on and be like “how did he fall that far in the draft?” Whether you look at him from a scouting perspective or a statistical perspective he comes out looking fantastic. He does everything you want a top prospect to do, he puts up points, he gets to the goal scoring areas of the ice, he has a ton of skill, and can make plays with the puck. The only thing he doesn’t have going for him is size. At this point the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. This was an incredibly smart pick by the Jackets and one that will make them look like geniuses down the road.
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@PaulBerthelot 
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