Each winter, Hockey East coaches scour prep school rinks in search of players who could potentially help their programs down the road.
While there are plenty of good prospects in prep school hockey, it is difficult for college coaches to project who might have potential to be an impact player at the next level.
There are various reasons for this. Being a good prep school player doesn’t automatically translate into being a good collegiate player. The ages of prep school players can vary significantly.
With the phenomenon of early recruiting, college coaches have the more difficult task of determining if a prospect might not have popped yet. Coaches try to gauge whether a prospect who is a good skater and has a good skill set might take off in their development, despite not having put it all together yet.
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Keeping in mind that late bloomers are still possible, New England Hockey Journal compiled a list of former New England prep school and Massachusetts and New Hampshire high school players who have scored 10 or more goals in a season at the Hockey East level since the 2014-15 season.
The data is quite clear. If a player isn’t dominant at the high school or prep school level, the chances are slim that he will have an offensive impact at the Hockey East level.
Since the 2014-15 season, 29 former prep and high school players have put up double digits in a given year at the Hockey East level. Of those 29 players, just two of them scored less than a point per game in prep. One was a defenseman and the other had a season skewed significantly more towards goal totals.
Obviously, there is a variable in this equation. It is significantly more difficult to score as a younger player in prep than it is as an older one. Using this season as an example, if an ’02, ’03 or ’04 is scoring less than a point per game, it would be unfair to count him out as a potential double digit goal scorer in Hockey East. However, the data is tough to disprove. It’s unlikely an ’00 or ’01 scoring at a clip of less than 1.3 points per game will ever have a significant offensive impact in Hockey East.
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During this time period, no player who played high school hockey in Massachusetts or New Hampshire has gone on to score 10 or more goals in a Hockey East season without scoring more than 1.42 points per game at the high school level.
Another interesting tidbit from this data is that only one of the 29 players went straight to college without playing a single game of junior hockey. That player, New Jersey Devils left wing Miles Wood, began playing at BC as a 20 year-old freshman, so he’s certainly an outlier.
Only seven of those 29 players have succeeded at the Hockey East level without playing in the USHL.
