The group is six members strong, and has two Finns and four Swedes (two of them abroad in Norway and England). He attended Vegas’s development camp last summer. After the 2011-12 season, HC Slovan Bratislava left the Slovak Extraliga in order to join the KHL, and the first real expansion of the KHL started. In terms of competitiveness within a league, Austria is probably the most competitive, while Slovakia, Denmark and Norway have the largest gap between playoff qualifiers and the rest of the teams. Last spring, the Predators went after Adam Smith, Brandon Fortunato, Lukas Craggs, Josh Wilkins, Hunter Garlent and Hugo Roy in some capacity. With this in mind, and as Slovan has been a member of the Russian league ever since (Lev Praha, another expansion team in a traditional country, has had to withdraw because of financial problems) I chose to look into the financials of the team to see how they changed with the KHL inclusion. Hughes (#21, blue) isn’t a player who is likely to be on too many teams’ radars this offseason, but I could see the organization giving the 2017 development camp attendee an AHL deal, at the very least, if they need to fill out depth. All players are listed by the current country of the players' birth location, regardless of their citizenship, where they were trained in hockey or what country they represented internationally. Limoges’s cycling ability was always impressive to me. ", Montreal Canadiens Schedule, Roster, News, and Rumors | Eyes On The Prize, The leagues of Europe and their relative competitiveness. With Mats Zuccarello in the NHL, it can only generate more interest, creating a cycle that will most likely increase interest among the young talent in Norway. Former Predator Mikael Granlund remains one of many players still trying to find their next team. Kinvall’s defensive ability is something to monitor. An average Swedish team has a turnover of 12.5 million Euros, which would have to be increased for a possible KHL team, as the transportation costs are a lot cheaper playing within Sweden than for teams literally crossing the whole of Asia for an away game. But 2019-20 has been somewhat of a down season for the Virginia native despite his still notching 32 points in 30 games. Cloud State Huskies (NCAA), It actually wouldn’t surprise me if Nashville has reached out to, If you’re seeing Detroit a lot on the list below, it shouldn’t be surprising. It is a very small sample size, but without the three-point system, the last five years (excluding the lockout season and including the 2010 season), the average point spread for missing the playoffs in the NHL is two points. Through the whole tournament, Sweden took  21 of 30 available points from their Finnish rivals. I expect Nashville to be quieter this spring: they’ll have a few drafted prospects to sign and have rounded out their pipeline nicely this season. Probably not, but it shows how the development of leagues changes, and how much a stable economy can mean for teams. The Swedish teams seemed to realize that you couldn't skate on one edge and get through, and seemed to take things more seriously, grabbing first place by quite a margin. Hughes has a short, choppy skating stride that probably limits his ceiling to the AHL (and maybe some service as an NHL call-up), but I’m a fan of his overall game that comes complete with slick passing ability, good vision in all three zones and great awareness. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy.

For the next step I decided to declare KHL as the best league in Europe, even if it varies a lot internally between teams. That really helped bring the article forward, and I can't  possibly express my thanks for the help provided.

A look at the different leagues in Europe, and whether we can rank them by strength. Links: Joël Teasdale is ready to resume his hockey career. The top teams were spread out much more with the current three-team grouping, but there were still groups that had two very strong teams, though the small team got two exhibition games at home. Farrance has one more year of eligibility, but the best defender in the country this year will surely be enticed by Nashville to leave school early. In today’s links, Teasdale’s itching to get started in pro hockey, Josh Anderson has more doubters to prove wrong, and condolences for the family of Joey Moss. The Swiss teams seem to be benefiting from what Patrick Thoresen (formerly of the Edmonton Oilers and Philadelphia Flyers, now with Djurgarden) described in Norwegian media (Hamar Arbeiderblad) "The Swiss league is better than the Czech as they get better imports due to good pay and no taxes." With the argument that a higher cost of salaries shows a better league, it could therefore be argued that the top Swedish teams would be able to fight it out for a playoff spot in the KHL (if you exclude any traveling costs). The polling was very straightforward: they had five minutes to arrange the leagues in the order they preferred, according to skill and quality. This is a long article, and I completely blame (or credit depending on how you see it) Bonaventura for that. Nonetheless, it serves as the best comparison with direct competition between the different leagues. As seen in the table above, the top three leagues are standout performers, there is a massive drop from the Swiss to the Czech League, and more or less decimals between Czech and Austria. With regard to the overall strength of the league, with both internal competitiveness and the tightness of the playoff race, Sweden is probably the most competitive league in Europe when factoring in its size. In fact, both match ups between a Finnish and Swedish club were won by the SHL representative. In this case, I tried to use the best second-place team in each group to see what that would say about second-tier teams. While the NHL uses a different point system, I used the 2014-15 NHL season as a reference point. At 22, he’s leading the team in scoring with 40 points in 49 games; the catch, of course, is that he’s a defenseman, and he averages just the sixth most ice time of the team’s defenders. Look no further than Slovan to provide most of the Slovak national team for the future. When using the CHL as an indicator, it is important to remember that in a four-team-per-group scheme (as their was in 2014-15) or a three-team group (this 2015-16 edition) if a team from a smaller nation manages to draw both a Finnish and Swedish team, the feeling must have been that they'd be in over their heads. (I took out the all-Finnish match-ups for it not to skew the stats, leaving only data for five Liiga teams). Were any of them right? How to Buy Discounted Nashville Predators Tickets, Marc Michaelis - F - Minnesota State Mavericks (NCAA), Jack Ahcan - D - St. One thing that really stands out in regards to this is the German league. The six-foot defender leads all blue liners at UND with 29 points and is second on the team in scoring behind likely Hobey Baker finalist Jordan Kawaguchi and tied for 11th among all defenders in the nation.

Sucese is a quick player, standing at just 5’8”. Looking at this year's CHL, the German teams are off to much better starts. The first one was average points-per-game for each country (in order to nullify the presence of eight teams each from the big countries). This is an interesting subject, and I have bothered ice hockey federations, clubs, friends and colleagues since I had "that" discussion, and Bonaventura tricked me into something I couldn't back down from. The Predators also have some potential options from their own draft history going into this summer. As the new season had just started, I used the 2014-15 season as a reference, working my way around with different formulas. This gives us a first, if ineffective, ranking. The top ten players from each country are included.

The table shows that while Finland had the most teams in the first playoff round, they did not do as well as the Swedish teams that qualified. The answer is quite simple, and a quick conversation with Jokerit spokesman/public relations representative Iiro Keurulainen confirmed that the salary costs had doubled when Jokerit joined the KHL, from between 4 and 5 million Euros to 10 million. I leave the last words of this piece to Mr. Vajda himself, as he signed off his e-mail to me: "Best wishes for the Habs in the upcoming season. In 2014-15 there were a few third-place teams finishing with nine points (Djurgarden, Bolzano and Ocelari Trinec from Czech Republic). Sucese attended Boston’s camp last summer and Limoges did so in Detroit. Sucese (#14, white) and Limoges have been a dynamic duo in contributing to Penn State’s fiery offense the past few seasons. Taking the list from Slovan Bratislava, we could extrapolate the turnover in total for Jokerit to be around 20 million Euros. The leagues in Europe all use a three-point system: three points for a win, two for an overtime/shootout win, and one going to the extra-time loser, with most leagues playing about 50- to 60-game seasons. To do this, I graded teams on a scale from one (1) point for making the playoffs as the last team, to a maximum of five (5) for the first-place finisher. Which could again point to a "tanking" scenario in the KHL with its tight playoff race, as in the NHL where non-playoff contenders give up players for future prospects to teams that are in position to make that playoff push.