Further to my post below, I went and put together a chart of OHL forwards who were drafted in 2004, provided that 2004 was their first year of eligiblity.
It’s pretty obvious how weird Schremp’s year was. He was the second OHL forward drafted that year. Every player who has gone on to have a better career than him (to date, that’s Wolski, Bolland, Kennedy, Kaleta and Reddox) scored more ES points than him with the exception of Kaleta.
An interesting question that the Pipeline Show guys might ask of Kevin Predergast or Stu MacGregor the next time they speak to them is what they make of such a weird split in a guy’s numbers. I would guess that the answer is that they don’t really pay attention to that sort of stuff. It’s a necessary question though, because Schremp was presumably highly ranked because of his work on the PP as opposed to his work at ES and I would further assume that that was the basis for the organization betting $800K or so on him in the form of a signing bonus.
I haven’t shown nearly enough here to support an argument that there’s anything to this but a) it makes sense to me that there would be and b) the two rocks that I’ve looked under so far haven’t dissuaded me. If anyone would care to do other years or leagues on their own, I encourage it and would be happy to provide space for reporting of results.
Update: I inadvertently included another Morrison with Jordan Morrison’s numbers. Morrison should be 11-8-8-27 at ES. A ranking of OHL forwards done purely on the basis of ES scoring would have had a top six of Wolski, McGrath, Garlock, Reddox, Bolland, Kennedy. The NHL saw the top six as Wolski, Schremp, Bolland, Bickell, Garlock and Berti. Bickell and Berti are reported as 6′4″ and 6′3″ in height by hockeydb.com.
I wasn’t aware of Schremp’s numbers heading into the draft, but his 19 year old seaon that had him score 145 points really whipped the masses into a frenzy despite his PP points making up something like 75% of his totals.
Why most fans didn’t see that as a major red flag is kind of baffling really.
I think we kind of have to assume that the Oilers hockey men realized that Schremp was bad at ES. You could see it by watching a single game of the wunderkid.
They were probably just going for the homerun, hoping that Schremp’s PP ability would transfer to the bigs(They had a terrible PP at the time)and they’d be able to protect him at ES.
Yeah, that seems quite likely to have been their thinking. What I wonder is whether that was reasonable or complete pie in the sky stuff. I’d bet on the latter.
Out of curiosity, would anyone at the time have known that it was pie in the sky/magical thinking at the time? Or is it just now that we (fans) and even the teams are getting a good handle on this kind of information.
RSM: I think there is (or at least should be) a gap between what we as fans have a handle on and what NHL scouting staffs have a handle on.
Incidentally, “Liam Reddox was a better ES junior scorer than Rob Schremp” is a line I plan to use.
This is great stuff, Tyler. We need to see more years, obviously, but ES scoring looks like the best way to evaluate draftees.
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