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Nerio · 12-25-2018, 03:24 AM

Draft Double Media, 1038 words + research
(If Draft double media is over, I'll use my First Article bonus on this one)

After the dust of the draft settled, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the players who were drafted by the same team, played on the same team in the S45 SMJHL Prospect Showcase, and played on the same line during that tournament. From there I looked at their individual stats, as well as their line stats, and calculated their lines contribution to the scoring of their team.

Some caveats to point out - while I hoped to come to conclusions about certain players and synergy they had with their linemates, I don’t think this will have the perfect answers for GMs trying to figure out what to do with all the new blood they’ve acquired. It does serve as an additional point of reference but it’s far away from the whole story as you know since these players have all updated quite a bit since these games. Additionally, whether a line is 1st, 2nd, or 3rd played a big part in that lines overall potential due to how the powerplay and pk lines were set up, so I made note of that. I also tried to look for undrafted player pickups that have since happened since the draft, apologies if I missed. Finally, this is focused on forward lines since there were not multiple D groups to compare, but there was one that I’ll touch on briefly.

To give a quick rundown of what the process, I first took the rosters of all the Prospect Showcase teams, cleaned out the ZZZ names, and started marking players based on the teams they were drafted by, with no color meaning undrafted. I’ll show a few images that illustrate the process as it’s pretty cool to see how things sift out.

[Image: Ey80cpq.png]

From there, I reorganized the list by players with matching colors, and deleted players that didn’t have matching draft teams within their prospect tourney team.

[Image: kfRwDhb.png]

At that point I went through the index to see what lines players were on, and kept the matching pairs. As expected, there aren’t a ton of them left, but surprisingly enough to make this worth looking into. Special shoutout to the Colorado Raptors, the Smebs, and presumably @ArGarBarGar for setting up all the Smebs on the Outlaws during the Prospect Showcase.

[Image: vl4IaGn.png]

So let’s tally up how many line matches each SMJHL team picked up:

Halifax - 2 matches
Colorado - 2 matches
St. Louis - 1 match
Kelowna - 1 match
Anchorage - 1 match (1 def match)
Montreal - 0 matches
Detroit - 0 matches
Vancouver - 0 matches
Lethbridge - 0 match
Anaheim - 0 match

And now, the stats. For this I include each players goals, assists, points, and +/- rating. For calculated the percentage of their team’s goals they scored, I included the amount scored by the 3rd player as well, but don’t display their stats since they were not signed by the same team.

Breakers 3rd line (Signed with Halifax)
PJ Paradise 11g 6a 17p -5
Andrej Doskočil 2g 11a 13p -20
This line accounted for 17% of their team’s goals.

Wranglers 1st line (Signed with Halifax)
Matt Kholin 14g 19a 33p +6
Oleg Scoreov 13g 21a 34p +8
This line accounted for 25% of their team’s goals.

Outlaws 1st line (Signed with Colorado)
Daniel Smeb 13g 24a 37p +1
Parker Smeb 17g 24a 41p +2
This line accounted for 37% of their team’s goals.

Outlaws 2nd line (Signed with Colorado)
Michael Scarn 18g 23a 41p -19
Steve Craig-Smeb 9g 17a 26p -22
This line accounted for 29% of their team’s goals.

Blazers 1st line (Signed with St Louis)
Tyler Tougard 17g 20a 37p +1
Blaže Zukal 15g 25a 40p +3
This line accounted for 29% of their team’s goals.

Blazers 3rd line(Signed with Kelowna)
Liam Hutchinson 5g 5a 10p -17
John Epiphone 4g 6a 10p -17
This line accounted for 9% of their team’s goals.

Bighorns 2nd line (Signed with Anchorage)
Olivier Cloutier 22g 19a 41p -7
Ashburn McAllister 9g 16a 25p -13
This line accounted for 25% of their team’s goals.

So with that, it does appear that Colorado may have made the best synergy based pickups with the Smebs and company. They appear to be an unstoppable ball of Korean synergy, so it’ll be interesting to see if they continue this trend. The forwards on the first two lines for the Outlaws accounted for two thirds of that team’s goals, and now Colorado has the opportunity to fit four of those forwards in their line up. There is a Smeb brother signed by another team that also played a huge role in the success of that first line, so I’m curious to see if the Smebs are ever fully reunited.

Halifax may also have some synergy on their hands as the forwards on the Breaker’s 3rd line accounted for 17% of their teams goals. This is pretty tough to do without any powerplay time at all, so there may be something there. The Breakers did have a pretty rough season though, so it is hard to say for sure. Halifax also picked up the first line of The Wranglers, one of the stronger teams in the Prospect Showcase. This line accounted for 25% of their regular season goals which appears fairly strong. I dug a little deeper with this group in particular and glanced at their playoff stats. The Wranglers finished 2nd in the playoffs, just falling short in a tight series to the Lions, and during that run this line finished #1 - 3 in scoring for their team, with the two signed players taking the #1 and 2 spot. That seems relatively promising, as those players together led their team to nearly the top of the prospect mountain.

It will be interesting to see if any of these players are kept together as they come into their new teams filling in gaps. This early look into what they are capable of when matched together may be a glimpse at the future for some of them.

And to finish, just for fun, here is the one matching defensive pairing with blocked shots included
Wranglers 1st D pairing (Signed with Anchorage)
Bill Umberger 5g 24a 29p +8 55 Blocked Shots
Kalevi Karhunen 9g 34a 43p +11 66 Blocked Shots

***goldenglutes*** · 12-25-2018, 03:44 AM

Nice article. It looks like Kelowna really got the short end of the stick drafting the pair with the least points, but time will tell I guess.

Signatures by Vulfzilla, Jepox, Jess, rum_ham, Ragnar, and myself
[Image: 9vAsr7c.png]

Thelastheraclid · 12-25-2018, 05:31 AM

Well researched article. Keep them coming!

Nerio · 12-26-2018, 05:14 AM

@goldenglutes Yeah it's hard to tell, we did get one match with the Knights but they were on the 3rd line on their prospect team. I still have high hopes we'll make some pretty deadly combos with our new players!

@Thelastheraclid Thank you! I enjoy looking into these niche kinds of things. Let me know if there is anything specific you'd like to see!

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