How Do The Oilers Play their AHL Forwards?

A couple weeks ago, Lowetide wrote a post about how the Oilers farm team overuses veterans. I linked to this one, but this has been something he’s railed about for years. So it inspired me to look into this a little more deeply. It’s all good to say the Oilers overplay their veteran AHL forwards, but all AHL teams have veterans. Do the Oilers use theirs more than any other team?

Who Cares?

Before we answer that question, it’s worth asking why this matters.

The AHL is a developmental league. It’s actually stated as such directly on their website where it bills itself as the top developmental league for the NHL. It also has specific rules in place to make development its top priority. Teams must ice at least 12 players with less than 260 professional games experience in every game. That’s a mark a player could reach as soon as their 4^th pro season.

While there is a lot a player can learn in the pressbox or on the bench, I’d suggest people generally learn the most by doing something. In short, you need to play hockey to get better at it. Obviously, there are limits to this. I don’t think it makes sense to throw a prospect out there for 30 minutes a game and watch him flounder. However, I also don’t think it’s optimal development to have your best young prospects sit on the bench while giving all your prime developmental time on ice to veterans with little chance of making it to the NHL.

In the NHL, it makes sense for young players to earn their ice time from the veterans. The NHL is not a developmental league. In the AHL, there’s not going to be much chance a 20-year-old rookie is going to outplay a 30-year-old vet. You have to give the 20-year-old ice time. That’s what he’s in the AHL to do. That’s how you develop him so that he might be ready to jump to the NHL by 22 or 23.

Okay, So Much Do They Play?

Unfortunately, the AHL does not post time on ice stats. So you can’t tell easily how much any individual is playing. However, there are ways you can estimate it using the other stats that they do track. Steven Burtch (@steveburtch) has developed a way of doing this at the AHL level. The website www.ahl.prospect-stats.com uses this formula to estimate the time on ice of every player at the AHL level (as well as the Canadian Major Junior leagues).

Now, this is an estimate, not an exact number. So it’s best we use these numbers as a ballpark and also accept them as the ‘best we have right now’. Still, we can use them to determine how AHL forwards are deployed.

The AHL Benchmark

I categorized every AHL forward by age and determined what percentage of the total estimated time on ice each age group took up.

The age range with the most estimated TOI dedicated to it is the 22-23 year olds. In fact, the 50% mark is 23.7. Half the time on ice in the AHL is given to forwards younger than this and half to forwards older.

Personally, I view a player who is 25 or older as no longer a prospect and having little chance of making it to the NHL. You can make an argument for a younger age, but I like 25 as it allows for pretty much all of your NCAA graduates (who range from age 22 to 24) to get a year of AHL time in before you “write them off” so to speak and view them as AHL veterans, not NHL prospects. Across the entire AHL, 64.2% of total forward ice time is dedicated to players younger than 25.

Bakersfield

So how does Bakersfield compare with this benchmark? I combined the ages into 2-year ranges when looking at individual teams. Mostly this is because many teams have only one player a particular age and that makes the graph tricky to read. Also, the goal here is look at the overall trend and not try to pick apart things at a granular level.

I also had to do some estimating in regards to two players: Andrew Miller and Zach Boychuk. These two were traded for each other near the end of the season. Unfortunately, AHL Prospect-Stats does not separate out their games played on the two different teams. So I took 11 games off Miller’s total (which he played for Charlotte) and added 16 games of Zach Boychuk. I had to assume their TOI didn’t change much from one team to another. I actually think that’s likely to be true, especially since we’re dealing with estimated TOI anyways. However, even if I’m wrong by 2 or 3 minutes a game (a significant change in usage), it would have negligible impact on the graph below, especially since we’re looking at broad trends. If you saw my tweets on Twitter or on Lowetide’s blog, you’ll see the uncorrected graphs and they are almost identical.

What’s striking are two age ranges. The Condors dedicate a lot of time on ice to the 20 to 21-year-old group and to the 30 to 31-year-old group. Compared to the AHL number of 64.2%, Bakersfield dedicated 59.6% of their total forward ice time to players younger than 25.

Weighted Time On Ice

Now, when I first presented this on Twitter, I got some great feedback. So the Condors give a lot of ice time to the 30 year olds. Is that a problem of roster make-up or roster deployment? What I mean is, maybe Bakersfield just has a lot of 20 to 21 year olds and a lot of 30 to 31 year olds with few in the middle. In that case, the problem is with the procurement of AHL players and prospects, not with how those prospects are played.

I tried to answer that question by calculating an average Time On Ice per game for each age range. I weighted this by games played so that the number wouldn’t be skewed by players who only got into a few games and either played a lot or a little in those games.

Here’s the AHL on average.

There’s small sample sizes at either end of the graph. The 18-19-year-old group is skewed upwards by a few top prospects who got played a ton (e.g. Nylander, Rantanen). Most of the others in that age range are Junior prospects who get called up for a handful of games at the end of the AHL season if their Junior season ends early. From age 20, time on ice generally increases for players as they get older until they hit their late 20s before dropping back down.

And Bakersfield?

Despite dedicating a lot of total ice time to their 20-21-year-old forwards, Bakersfield actually plays their young forwards below league average in terms of ice time per game. They just have more than the league average number of forwards in that age range. Each one gets a smaller piece of the pie. Meanwhile, the 22-25 year olds play from a minute-and-a-half to over two minutes less than league average per game.

Those 30 year olds, though, get a ton of ice time per game. The big spike above league average you see are 29-year-old Rob Klinkhammer (for 27 games), and 30-year-olds Ryan Hamilton and Matthew Ford (who was on an AHL contract). I recognize Bakersfield was trying to make a playoff push in the latter half of the season. However, the end result was they didn’t make the playoffs and they didn’t give their prospect forwards more playing time.

As a side note, you might notice that huge number in 18-19 age range. That’s entirely from 6 games of Draisaitl at the start of the year.

What Does It Mean?

I’m not suggesting here that the Oilers prospects would be substantially better if they played them more. However, if you have a farm team and one of their major roles is developing players for your major league team, dedicating 24% of your total ice time to three players aged 29 and older seems less than optimal. Surely some of that ice time would be better spent on guys who might help the NHL squad in the future. Guys like Tyler Pitlick, Anton Slepyshev, Kyle Platzer or even Mitch Moroz (all of whom played under an estimated 15 minutes a game).

New Additions

Next year, I suspect things will be a bit different for a few reasons.

Firstly, the Oilers brought in a number of NCAA prospects. Drake Caggiula may jump straight to the NHL but if he doesn’t he’ll likely soak up a good amount of developmental minutes in the AHL as a 22-year-old. Patrick Russell is 23 and should play the year developing in Bakersfield. Joey Benik has an AHL only deal but is in the upper end of the age range of prospect status at 24.

Meanwhile, neither Matthew Ford nor Rob Klinkhammer appear to be returning. They were two-thirds of the “elder statesmen” who soaked up AHL minutes. Likewise Andrew Miller has moved on. Only Ryan Hamilton remains and will be joined at the AHL level by 25-year-old Taylor Beck (who may be in the NHL) and 26-year-old Scott Allen.

Looking to Providence

This may be in keeping with how Chiarelli wants to run his AHL team. He brought aboard Keith Gretzky from Boston as his AGM. One of Gretzky’s main roles will be running the farm team in Bakersfield. Here’s how the Bruins ran their farm team in Providence last year.

Again, full disclosure, I had to adjust a player for Providence. Rob Bordson (27-years-old) played 60 games in the AHL last season but only 10 of them with Providence. So I guessed his usage was similar between Providence and Iowa and gave 10 of his games to the Bruins. Even if his TOI was off by a couple minutes a game between the two teams, it will have a negligible impact on the graph.

Providence dedicated a ton of ice time to their 22 and 23 year olds. Compared to the AHL average of 64.2%, Providence dedicated 77.5% of their forward TOI to players under 25. They played two vets for significant minutes. One was 30 year old veteran Max Talbot who played 20+ minutes for 26 games. The other was 27-year-old Brandon DeFazio playing about 17 and a half minutes a night. Other than that, no one 25 or older got a large number of minutes per game for a significant length of time.

I don’t know if that was intentional or not. I don’t know what Keith Gretzky’s view of AHL development is (nor Chiarelli’s for that matter).

However, I do think the Oilers should use more of their precious developmental ice-time in Bakersfield for actual prospects.

Things may be changing in Bakersfield this season in that regards. We’ll find out soon.

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