Can Edmonton Oilers find ever elusive 2.5% solution in their bottom-end prospects?

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The goal of National Hockey League scouts, player development departments, and minor league coaches is to identify, acquire and development future NHL players, in particular players who can become part of their team’s Core 12, the top seven forwards, four d-men and goalie who make up the spine of any team.

If a team drafts in the top handful of picks in the annual NHL draft, they’ve got a 70 per cent chance of finding such a player with their pick.

That drops down to about a coin flip, a 50 per cent chance, if you’re drafting five through ten or so, in the range where the Oilers drafted Evan Bouchard, Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg recently, an excellent run of drafting by the team.

By the end of the first round, your chance of drafting such a player slip to about one in five, 20 per cent.

And after that?

Things get awfully dicey awfully fast.

Since the 2012 draft when the Cult of Hockey started to rate and and rank all Oilers prospects, our main focus has been the Top 20 prospects on the each year. We write individual profiles on those players. As for players outside the below the Top 20, they are more of an after thought. Since 2012,  80 players have been ranked below the Top 20 in total. Almost all of these players were taken after the third round of the draft or signed as undrafted free agents.

Of those 80 low-end prospects, just 19 went on to play at least one NHL game, with just nine of them playing more than 100 games.

But only one out of the 80 has made it in the NHL as a core player on his team, d-man John Marino, with Pittsburgh, New Jersey and now Utah. Marino has played more than 20 minutes per game five years in a row.

But Marino, a sixth round pick in 2015, never played a game in Edmonton because he refused to sign here out of college and was traded to Pittsburgh in 2019 for sixth round pick.

Next closest to making it big in the NHL as a Core 12 player is Michael Kesselring, a sixth round pick in 2018.  Kesselring showed right from the start at Edmonton development camps that he had a wide range of skating skills and hockey smarts, especially for a rangy 6-foot, 5-inch defender. But after two-and-a-half years in Bakersfield he was traded to the Utah franchise along with a third round pick for big centre Nick Bjugstad and minor league d-man Cam Dineen.

This past summer Kesselring was the main piece sent to Buffalo in Utah’s trade for promising forward J.J. Peterka.

If Kesselring sticks as a Top 4 d-man in Buffalo, that would be two out of 80 of Edmonton’s bottom end prospects making it as Core 12 NHLers.

That’s 2.5 per cent.

We can see from past drafts that it’s the d-men who are most likely to develop out of this bottom group into 2.5%ers

The Oilers hit in the draft on Marino and Kesselring, and have also had a few close calls with Vincent Desharnais, Markus Niemelainen, Taylor Fedun and William Lagesson. They all showed that spark of talent and package of skills that lent hope they would become useful NHLers, maybe even core Top 4 d-men on their team.

On Wednesday, my Cult colleague Kurt Leavins looked at the forwards in this current bottom group:

21 Aidan Park F January 2006
22 Jayden Grubbe F Jan. 2003
25 Matt Copponi F June 2003
26 Dalyn Wakely F March 2004
27 Matvey Petrov F March 2003
30 Brady Stonehouse F August 2004
31 James Stefan F August 2003
33 Petr Hauser F Sept. 2003
34 Maxim Denezhkin F Dec. 2000

Today I look at the long shot goalies and d-men:

23 Damien Carfagna D Dec. 2002
24 Albin Sundin D August 2004
28 Bauer Berry D October 2005
29 Daniel Salonen G Dec. 2005
32 Connor Ungar G January 2002

Of the d-men who have risen highest as long shots, Kesselring, Desharnais and Niemelainen are all huge men, with Lagesson also a bulky player. In this group, there’s no such Goliath, though Berry has good size.

At the Oilers development camp, the one who most caught my eye was a smaller player, Carfagna. He was the most dominant d-man on the ice. Of course, at age 22, he was also one of the older players at the camp, a significant advantage. But he was lightning agile on his skates and sharp with the puck.

GM Stan Bowman signed Carfagna as a college free agent this spring, the player having completed three years of college play, scoring 28 points in 38 games for Ohio State.

Of this year’s group of bottom end players, I’ll suggest that Aidan Park and Carfagna have the best chance of becoming 2.5%ers. Lke the the rest of the players in this group, they are massive long shots.

But that didn’t stop Marino or Kesselring. Perhaps it won’t stop one of them.

At the Cult of Hockey

STAPLES: ‘Canadian mutants’: Ex-NHLer rips Oilers star player and fans, gets ripped back

LEAVINS: This fresh face on the Edmonton Oilers’ Top Prospects list will attempt to buck long NHL odds

STAPLES: ‘Worst feeling in the world’: Have Edmonton Oilers run out of key ingredient to chase Stanley Cup?