What can we expect scoring-wise from KHLers like Evgeny Kuznetsov, Jiri Sekac, Leo Komarov, Petri Kontiola, and Jori Lehtera?

There’s no need to get out the Tarot cards and the tea leaves, because hockey analytics can actually shed some interesting light on this topic. Given that the KHL is the league most comparable to the NHL in quality, its data is surprisingly useful in projecting NHL scoring. It’s almost reasonably as effective as having actual NHL data on which to base a player’s projection.

How is this done? With NHL equivalencies (NHLe), which are easily one of my favourite modern analytic innovations. Three years ago on ESPN, for example, I used it to project Jaromir Jagr‘s scoring upon coming back to the NHL. I’ve also used it with the other European leagues, the AHL, the U.S. Colleges, and even the Canadian juniors. Over the years I’ve refined the process by adding age curves, separating goals and assists, accounting for ice time, and much more.

The methodology is explained in far more detail in Chapter 14 of Hockey Abstract, and all the data is available on the Hockey Abstract website, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Simply put, we take all the players who previously moved from the KHL to the NHL, and figure out how much of their scoring that they retained after the jump. Then when we want to figure out how many points someone will score in the NHL, we can just multiply their KHL scoring rate by that translation factor.

Here’s a table of the latest translation factors, fresh from Chapter 14. For each league, the translation factor is broken down by what it was prior to and after the 2005 lockout, when a lot of NHL players were competing in various professional leagues, and NHL-ready youngsters were remaining in juniors and colleges for an additional season. The translation factor for the KHL since the lockout, for example, is 0.78, so in its very simplest form, a player’s scoring rate in the NHL can be estimated by multiplying his KHL scoring rate by that number.

Of course, I love seeing this type of data on a chart, an approach that is even more clear and precise. The following chart includes every player who played at least 20 games in the KHL before playing at least as many in the NHL, since the 2005 lockout. Each player’s scoring rate in their final season in the KHL is on the horizontal axis, and their first-season NHL scoring rate on the vertical axis. I’ve also placed the five players in question this year on the trend line, and highlighted them in blue.

Using this history, and what we currently speculate their roles will be in the NHL, we can establish the following scoring expectations for the five KHLers.

Evgeny Kuznetsov, Washington Capitals

The chart position of this year’s most exciting KHL arrival, Evgeny Kuznetsov, is a little bit deceiving. His average scoring rate over the two preceding seasons was 0.84, much higher than last year’s 0.68. That would actually put him just behind Vladimir Tarasenko, who scored 19 points in 38 NHL games in the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season, which works out to 41 over a full 82-game season. Even that projection is a little pessimistic, in my view, given that it is below both the trend line, and the 9 points in 16 games Kuznetsov managed late last year.