Finding an NHL comparable for the Canucks’ top 10 prospects 2022 – `

What can the Vancouver Canucks realistically expect their prospect system to deliver to their NHL roster in the years ahead?

It’s a crucial question facing the new Canucks regime. The hill this club has to climb is steep, as they seek to catch the best teams in the Western Conference and keep pace in the years to come with a pair of young divisional rivals that have outperformed Vancouver at the NHL level this season and are prospect rich to boot — teams like the Anaheim Ducks and the Los Angeles Kings.

In order to illustrate what the Canucks might have in their system and what their best prospects could contribute in the years ahead, we wanted to bump our customary look at the NHL comparables of the top-10 Canucks prospects forward to precede our midseason top-10 list, which we’ll debut on Friday.

As always, during the course of this project we will pair statistical analysis with common sense and identify some high- and low-end NHL comparables for each of the top-10 prospects in the Canucks system.

These comparables aren’t purely stylistic — who could forget the immortal Jordan Schroeder “Patrick Kane, but stronger” comparable — but instead they’re the product of some data analysis consistent with the principals of the “cohort models” — first developed publicly at CanucksArmy.com — that have become en vogue around the league for analyzing the NHL draft. In searching for our comparables we build a database and pore over scoring rates, stature, age and the league of each of the top-10 Canucks prospects and identify NHL players past and present that roughly match each prospect in the Canucks system.