2008-05-11

Projecting Sergei Kostitsyn

There is far less of a track record here, so anything said should be taken with a grain or two of salt. Also, Sergei shot an unrealistic 18.4% so we should dock him about three goals when looking for comparisons. Doing so would put his ppg at .46 rather than .52. Lastly, like Anrdei, he is an 'old' 20 in the chart because he's a March 20 birthday. I compensated a little for this by including some young 21yo seasons in the 20yo column below.



Sorted by their ppg at 20, italics are NHLE.

Koivu's .89 in the SM-Liiga was way back in 94-95. He was only 4 months older than Sergei in 95-96, when he put up .55ppg over a whole season. I think Kostitsyn is short of Koivu.

Weight began in a high scoring era, making his .57 pretty close to a modern .45.

Comrie's numbers are a little better and include more goals. Time will tell whether the problems afflicting Comrie are present in SKost.

Druken had a nice 20yo season and might be retired at 29. There is a sign in Shea Heights, Newfoundland saying "Home of Harold Druken."

Hemsky's ahead of Kostitsyn. He had a better 19yo season (a young 19, mind you, with less icetime) than Sergei did at 20. No real comparison here.

Mike Richards had a better 18yo OHL season than Kostitsyn (1.24 to 1.53), but Kostitsyn blew him away (1.35 to 2.22) at 19 when he played with Kane and Gagner. Their NHL starts were comparable.

Derek Roy is probably the closest comp statistically. At 20 he had similar NHL icetime, and .39ppg in 49 games. In the AHL at 20, both had 1.00ppg.

Nilsson also put similar NHL numbers in a partial season and 1.00ppg in the AHL at 20. Henrik Sedin's numbers look to be behind Kostitsyn's.


So where big brother looks like a poor man's Hossa, little bro uses an interesting blend of skill and chippiness that reminds me of Mike Richards. His scoring numbers look closer to Roy's for now. Being such a late draft pick, he'll need to put up more solid numbers before he's accepted as the real deal.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Have a form of era-neutral stats been developped? I recall Mirtle trying to do something like that on Ovechkin earlier this year...

5/11/2008 12:12 p.m.  
Blogger Jeff J said...

I think there was a comprehensive effort at Daryl Shilling's Hockey Project (RIP), but it's gone now. Maybe we could find it at the Internet Archive.

This behindthenet article gives you an idea of historical scoring levels, which might be good enough for something like this.

Looking at history would mean a lot more hockey-reference searches, and
I'm trying to keep these to under an hour of effort.

5/11/2008 1:17 p.m.  

Post a Comment

<< Home