How forward scoring rates change between Hockeyallsvenskan and the SHL

Vår nya amerikanska bloggare Zach Ellenthal är tillbaka med en ny djupdykning i den svenska statistiken. I dag tar han hjälp av de underliggande siffrorna för att ta reda på vad man egentligen ska förvänta sig av en forward som går från Hockeyallsvenskan till SHL.

HockeyAllsvenskan plays a crucial role in the European hockey landscape not only as a quality and competitive league, but also in providing development opportunities for players working their way up to bigger and brighter spotlights.

In any given year, roughly 35 players jump from HockeyAllsvenskan to the SHL in consecutive seasons, only including players who skated in a minimum of 20 games in both the before and after season.

One simple way to measure how successful these players are in making the jump, as well as the difference in quality between the two leagues, is to calculate how scoring rates change for these players. I am only going to look at forwards the rest of the way, knowing that point production doesn’t tell the full story, and even less of it for defensemen.

Looking at just forwards gives us 230 seasons to look at. As a group, they went from 0.62 points per game in the prior HockeyAllsvenskan season to producing 0.32 points per game in the following SHL season — retaining 51 percent of their scoring rate. The median is a bit lower at 47 percent. (As a sidenote, goal and assist rates are equally affected.)

So that gives us our baseline. A forward should expect to see their scoring rate cut roughly in half when they move to the SHL. But there are several other factors at play here — how does this change when we split this out by HockeyAllsvenskan performance or player age?

By HockeyAllsvenskan Performance

Players of all types and abilities graduate from HockeyAllsvenskan to the SHL. Sometimes it's a high-end talent who proves to be far too good for HockeyAllsvenskan, like Adam Tambellini. Sometimes it's an accomplished veteran who finally gets a chance at the SHL level, like Alexander Bergström. And other times, it's a depth player on a team that gets promoted and all of a sudden finds himself in the SHL, like Markus Modigs.

Here, I've taken all 230 forward seasons and plotted the HockeyAllsvenskan points per game on the x-axis and the SHL points per game on the y-axis. This gives us a bird's eye view of player performance, as well as some outliers and an overall trendline.

To quickly summarize all this, I'll bucket HockeyAllsvenskan performance into a handful of tiers to see how scoring rates changed.

That top row is most interesting to me -- if you take the most effective HockeyAllsvenskan scorers, on average, year one in the SHL is likely to come in below even 0.50 points per game.

By Age

Let's look at player age now. Being talented enough to make the jump to the SHL as a junior, like Elias Pettersson or Emil Bemström, is a very different situation than a player debuting in the SHL in his mid-twenties.

Junior aged players are in a class of their own here, they're mostly high-end players, many of whom are currently NHL regulars or top prospects. After that, I see another bump at age 22 and 23 in terms of readiness and effectiveness. It looks like the sweet spot for non-elite players.

All players in their thirties, understandably a smaller sample size, compare well here to players in their twenties. With roughly the same HockeyAllsvenskan scoring rate, they retain more of their scoring at the next level. My guess here is you have more players with past SHL experience and are better prepared, be it mentally or physically.

*****

As I mentioned before, point production is just a piece of a complex story when it comes to projecting performance. Nor does looking at just year one of SHL performance -- someone like Kalle Östman this season has made a large leap forward two years removed from HockeyAllsvenskan.

This is not meant as a projection model, but it does help us begin to understand what we can expect from this year's HockeyAllsvenskan class, players like Linus Karlsson, Nick Olesen, and Jens Lööke, if they make the jump next season.

All data comes from eliteprospects.com. You can take a look at the raw data for yourself here

Who is Zach Ellenthal?

I am a hockey fan from the United States, who after studying abroad in Sweden in 2014, fell in love with all things related to Swedish hockey. I've even been fortunate to make a couple trips back to Sweden in the last few years to travel around to different cities and games, including a seven game trip across the country right before the pandemic. I enjoy watching, reading about, and blogging about Swedish hockey, and as a quarantine project last year created a stats website called Svengelska Hockey. I've been reading hockeysverige.se content for seven years, and now look forward to contributing some of my own.