New York Rangers: Dialing Back Expectations For Prospects

Though it may be easy to get swept up in the excitement about the New York Rangers’ many new prospects, it also grows more important to remember to keep expectations realistic.

The New York Rangers finally have a quality prospect pool. For the first time in many years, management has taken a different approach to team building. With the success of so many teams around the league coming from the entry draft, the strategy of having a constant flow of youth is being embraced by New York after years of mortgaging the future.

Scouts and upper management place their eyes like hawks on these kids, watching them develop into true potential NHLers. They travel across the globe to see them play, study their skills and compare their stats to their predecessors. They speak to them and coach them and mold them into the shape they hope the team will take on going forward.

As fans, it can be difficult to get a real assessment of these players since there is such limited access.  It can be easy to get swept up in the hype and the excitement when seeing great plays on social media or the internet. There are resources out there to view games the prospects are playing in, but even that coupled with stats is only one small piece of the puzzle.

Setting Expectations

The first thing to keep in mind is simple: keep your expectations low, but don’t let that interfere with excitement. It’s okay to be excited about a guy that only has a small chance of succeeding. Where it becomes problematic is through insistence that if “x player does not replicate y player, then x player is a failure.”

Stats wise, it is easy to look at a player who was a big scorer in juniors and think that this guarantees them a spot in the NHL. Age matters greatly, as do linemates, general team success, and the junior league itself. A perfect example of this is Rangers prospect Ty Ronning. Though he scored 61 goals last year, he did it as a 20 year old in the WHL, a high scoring league as it is, against competition 95% of which is younger than him.

European players can be even harder to gauge, because their scoring numbers may be low. This can be good and bad. In these cases, age, deployment, general team success, and linemates matter in almost the opposite fashion. European coaches have a habit of using younger players in much smaller amounts of play time, while relying on veterans to win. Men’s leagues are professional “winning” leagues at heart, not developmental leagues like the Canadian juniors.

Vitali Kravtsov and Pavel Buchnevich are two recent Rangers prospects who spent their developmental years in Russia. It is easy to underrate Kravtsov because his youth and state of his team make his goal and assist totals look a little less than impressive, but looking at the percentage of points scored vs past players in that league reveals a lot.

NHL Coach Values

Great! Your favorite prospect has made his respective pro team (AHL or NHL). It is exciting to see where their trajectory will take them. However, the last step is perhaps the most important one: impressing your pro coach.

NHL coaches want their best players to succeed, young and old. Some teams value youth more than others and give longer leashes to them, while others have a very tight grip. This is where we see many prospects fail. North American pro hockey teams are about one thing and one thing only: winning, at the expense of anything and anyone.

It can be frustrating to watch an obviously talented prospect get buried in the lineup. Look at Filip Chytil and Lias Andersson this year alone. It is very obvious that they are most likely as talented and have more potential than at least half of the lineup, but without that trust element being proven to their coach, it is a slow buildup to becoming a full time NHLer.

Some players falter here, and no one is truly at liberty to say who is right or wrong.  Alexander Khokhlachev in Boston is one of the most glaring examples of a talented prospect losing the battle with his coach.   A second round draft pick, Khokhlachev  excelled in the AHL, with a high of  23 goals and 68 points in 60 games in 2015-16.  In over three seasons, Boston coach Claude Julien played him in all of nine games  He is clearly very talented offensively, but was never given the time he may have needed to get to the next level. Whether that was on him, on the coach, or a little bit of both, is up in the air, but it is important that both sides find compromise here.  It didn’t happen in Boston as Khokhlachev signed with the KHL the next season.

As fans, it’s easy to say that a prospect should treated under a “let me play until I give the coach a reason to bump me down” kind of basis. Many coaches, however, operate under the very opposite. Depending on the coach, it can very frequently be a “start low and grow” system.

For this reason, realistic expectations are extremely important. Unless the prospect in question is a generational talent, or performs so incredibly well at all levels that it would look ridiculous not to use him, there are going to be a ton of growing pains. We will see it with Vitali Kravtsov, K’Andre Miller, Nils Lundkvist, Libor Hajek, and many others to come. Some will make it, others won’t. The best we can do is just keep watching, be excited about what we see, hope for the very best, and prepare for the very worst.