The Draft is coming soon, the end of hockey is near. It means that the buzz around hockey prospect content is reaching new heights. Fortunately, I have been working on prospect stats since October and with my friends Chace McCallum and Josh Khalfin, we are about to release the final product of months of researches. It will be a website that allows you to make your own assessment of prospects using dashboards like if you were in the hockey operation department of a real hockey team. With the dashboards and videos you will watch on your own, you should be more critical about what you can read online about prospects (because there is a lot of information, but a small proportion is reliable) and you should be able to have debates with people online and look smarter than everyone else in the room the night of the Draft.
You already know I have not posted a lot in the last couple of months. Why?
I am still a full-time Finances student
I got hired in professional hockey (it is the part where you congratulate me) — Wait a couple of weeks to find out where… or just guess it
A lot of the work I have been doing lately was Data Engineering related (ETL — Finding the Data, Extracting it, Transforming it for Analysis Purposes, and Loading the Data in a Database where Chace and Josh were able to make amazing visualizations)
I am still partially a Data Analyst in my heart. I am still a huge fan of story telling and data visualization and this article is a testimony of that.
So what is this article about?
After building around 20 data scrapers for about 10 different hockey leagues (because you need schedule data, play-by-play data, players stats, etc.), the data analyst in me wanted to join Chace and Josh who were having a lot of fun visualizing and modelling the data I have been scraping. I already had a lot of interest in covering the QMJHL (because I have special ties with the Gatineau Olympiques and they were really good this season), so I jumped on the opportunity to make a quick analysis of what what happened in the QMJHL playoffs.
So I built a GameScore model using the last 3 seasons of the league. I was inspired by the work from Mike Murphy. If you did not know already, the GameScore is an estimation of how good a player was in a given game using Box Score statistics. It is not meant to replace video and it has a lot of limitations, but with the right usage, you can make really good analysis and tools just like Dom is doing with theAthletic. For me, it was also a quick way to get something going with QMJHL data without having to work for an additional 3 months before I make public work again.
Let’s start diving right in the research!
Who were the best players of the Playoffs?
The QMJHL featured some really good hockey players this season… No Alexis Lafrenière this season, but we got to see some players that might have a career in the NHL in a couple of years. The table above shows the 20 best average GameScore per player during the playoffs. Players on the list are usually older players (in their DY+1, DY+2,…) who played on powerhouses. Josh Lawrence is an interesting case. Size kept him from getting drafted, but his skill is undeniable and I think he should get some attention from NHL teams, although his point production might be inflated (to some extent) by the fact that he played all season with really good players (even if he is a good player himself). Zach Dean had a really good season and he kept it going in the playoffs (until the Québec Remparts completely shut him off offensively). The St.-Louis Blues should be really excited by the progression of their new protégé (he was involved in a trade (NHL) that sent Ivan Barbashev to the Golden Knights of Vegas). He was the best player of a really talented Olympiques team. To complete the top-3, we have Justin Robidas (Carolina Hurricanes prospect). What is fascinating about him and James Malatesta (Columbus Blue Jackets prospect) is that they have been consistently good… even in the last 2 rounds of the playoffs. Against the top teams in the league, they have found ways to get on the scoresheet.
Blame the QMJHL for not having a transparent logo of the Voltigeurs’ logo
The table we see here shows the best playoff performances (GameScore wise) we have seen this year in the QMJHL playoffs. Without any surprises, most of them are top players on powerhouses feasting against the worst teams of the playoffs.
Before looking at points, NHLe and everything we need to understand the context of the league we are assessing. The QMJHL is a SUPER UNBALANCED league. Blowouts happen more often than in pro hockey. Good teams are really good and could probably compete against a couple of teams at the professional and university level. The non-top-teams are bad and really bad teams. They are usually really young and they probably have a lot of draft picks. “Tanking” is a common theme in junior hockey. When you don’t have a shot at winning the Cup, you usually sell all your assets of value to bank on draft picks and prospects to prepare the next run at the Trophy Gilles Courteau. Aside of few surprises in round 1 and 2, the outcome of the playoffs was not a huge surprise : we mostly had a really good idea of which teams were going to be in the semi-final and final. Québec had a good run last year, and they have added few players to an already solid core to win the championship.
Screenshot of the standings in the QMJHL. All teams in the top-4 ended up in the semi-finals and the #1 team won the final against the #2 team.
So in recap, what did we learn today so fair :
Unlike the NHL where the difference of talent between the best and the worst teams of the playoffs is smaller, the QMJHL has more blowouts during the playoffs and some players can take advantage of that to inflate their point production.
In your team, you want players that will find ways to produce against good teams (because at the end of the day, that is more important than having a 6-point night against a bad team)
Looking at the playoffs of 3 players you might be interested in
James Malatesta, the MVP of the playoffs
Aside of being a Columbus Blue Jackets prospects, James Malatesta is also one of the most talented players in the QMJHL. I remember he was a highly anticipated prospect when he got drafted in the league a couple of years ago. During the playoffs, Malatesta showed up big in big moments. Scoring 14 goals in 18 games is not impressive enough, 5 of those 14 goals ended up being game-winning-goals. This is why he got the MVP of the playoffs. As we can see in the plot above, facing top opponents did not slow him down. He managed to keep a really good level of play in the semis and the finals to help the Québec Remparts to win their 1st QMJHL Championship since… 1975-1976.
Joshua Roy, the Hab’
2 Habs prospects suited up for the 2023 QMJHL playoffs : Riley Kidney and Joshua Roy. Despite being the one who got drafted the lasted among the two, Roy is the one who is getting the most attention after a really good DY+1 campaign and a really good showing at the latest World Junior tournament. Joshua Roy was a former QMJHL 1st overall pick who started his junior career in an atypical way : lots of concerns about his attitude and his overall involvement in the play. The bad noise surrounding his name got him to fall to later rounds at the NHL Draft despite evident signs of talent. Since the Phoenix of Sherbrooke traded for him, it is a new man and all the negativity surrounding his name completely vanished. He got drafted by his the NHL team he grew up watching and he is making a case for a really good Disney story. Now that you know about the story behind Joshua Roy, we can focus on his playoffs. Like expected, the best player of the Phoenix showed no signs of mercy for his opponents in the first two rounds. He was everywhere offensively, making the right plays defensively, he looked like no one could stop him… until he faced the Halifax Mooseheads. That Mooseheads team was really difficult to play against. They gave ferocious adversity to anyone playing them. It looks like they competently nullified Joshua Roy. He was left with no answers. It was still good playoffs for him.
Tristan Luneau, the D
After a season where he broke almost all franchise records you can imagine in the history of the Gatineau Olympiques, Tristan Luneau had the task to take the Olympiques to the Gilles Courteau Trophy without his Anaheim Ducks teammate Noah Warren. Luneau was one of the best players of the most talented team we have seen in Gatineau in years and he was eager to push his team to the Cup. Unfortunately, it did not go as planned. Like expected, he looked amazing in the first 2 rounds against weaker opponents, but he could not help his team to steal a game against the Remparts. The Remparts have swept Gatineau, but almost all games ended up in overtime or with a 1 goal difference. It was a hardly fought series and Luneau did good… but not good enough. Costly turnovers and bad reads defensively, and it’s a Québec goal.
Closing thoughts
I hope you enjoyed your read. This is a ~1,500 word applications of some work I have been doing for months now.
In summary :
Follow Chace and Josh (you can also follow me) because the best public Draft Analysis tool — TheDraftDigest — will be released soon
I built a lot of data scrapers for hockey data because it might be useful in the future and…
“The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualise it, to communicate it – is going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.” —Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google.
All leagues have their own characteristics and understanding them is key before you make conclusions
Difference of talent between the powerhouses and the rest of the league is a lot more significant than what hockey fans can be used to in the NHL
What made a difference is that the best teams were able to shutdown the opposition’s best offensive players
Good games against weak teams inflate aggregates (I know it is simple and super logic, but I think it is worth mentioning)
With video analysis and having understanding of the injury context, I think we can dig even more into why top players such as Joshua Roy and Tristan Luneau were hand-tied against the best 2 teams in the league, and we can suggest more applicable answers.
Make sure to stay put because a lot of public content is coming from me... if I decide to take a break from learning again.