Who Won the McGroarty for Yager Trade?
A look at who Brayden Yager is and some discussion on prospect analytics, as well as extremas in normal distributions.
It’s August, and we're still digging for content. Unfortunately, what I had planned for this month has been delayed due to some logistical complications.
Welcome to The Five Hohl!
Here, we (that’s me, with occasional editing help from a friend who cleans up my terrible English) offer some of the most in-depth analytical looks at the Winnipeg Jets and the NHL in general. Regulars know this is also where I explore the intersection of sports science, portfolio theory, and hockey analytics.
So sit back, relax, read, enjoy, and then help spread the word about The Hohl… err, The Five Hohl.
Quick Update With The Life of Garret
The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a gong show, hence the sporadic updates.
I was away for a bit, left my computer charger in Vancouver, and, of course, the first bit of actual Winnipeg Jets hockey news in weeks breaks while I'm unprepared. So, I’m a little late, but as the saying goes: the best time to plant a tree was yesterday; the second best time is today.
Also, a bit of a spoiler: the summer analytics series is on pause due to some logistical steps needed from our partners/websites. I’m excited, but unfortunately, this is taking some time.
Lastly, this chaotic few weeks have also pushed my workouts to the back burner, so I can’t really critique the mesocycle I’ve talked about here recently. I managed a couple of “heavy” squat and deadlift sessions… and by a couple, I mean one of each over three weeks. They went about as well as you’d expect. I’m at about 75-80% of my peak strength. Oh dear.
I know short-term market fluctuations aren’t that important to long-term investors, other than their impact on future expected returns. I know the right thing is not to look too much or care, but how about that recent Small Cap Value roller coaster?
Trending Winnipeg Jets Topics
Rutger McGroarty traded
So, no news to report. See you next time at The Five Hohl.
Just kidding—if you haven’t heard, Rutger McGroarty was traded by the Winnipeg Jets to the Pittsburgh Penguins in exchange for Brayden Yager. It’s one of the few notable news points lately, although there’s been a bit more movement in the past few days than expected for this time of year.
Who Is Brayden Yager
Well, hopefully, he doesn’t turn out quite the same as his distant relative Eren, son of Grisha. (That’s a reference I’m sure will confuse most of you.)
In all seriousness, Yager is a 6-foot, 170-pound, right-shot center playing out of the Western Hockey League. He’s a draft year younger than McGroarty and was selected only four spots before the Jets’ 2023 first-round pick, Colby Barlow.
I haven’t watched much of Yager myself, but his shot and release are two things that have always stood out to me (and to most others, based on my research and inquiries to trusted sources). He’s definitely more of a shooter than a passer. While he’s not a bad distributor, his playmaking is fairly straightforward.
There have been mixed reports on his consistency, but no one questions his compete level. He skates hard, though he’s not the kind of skater who will wow you. That’s not surprising, given that the Jets tend to rate compete and effort quite highly.
Personally, I think “consistency issue” is often code for a player who scores but isn’t an elite scorer, so we’re fooled by the inherent clumpiness and streakiness in random distributions. His skating has also improved since his draft season.
NHLEs
You’ll notice a few prospects missing from this list. I’ve removed some of the guys playing in European pro leagues who are unlikely to come to North America, as well as those whose rights are basically just waiting to expire. I also haven’t included two of the new Jets’ defenders, as Euro junior league NHLEs are non-existent and of fairly rough quality.
For those unfamiliar, NHLEs (NHL Equivalencies) provide a way to equate point production across different leagues. It uses the average point-per-game pace sustained by players who transition from those leagues to the NHL.
NHLEs are helpful for making apples-to-apples comparisons of players in similar situations but different leagues. For example, it does a good job of comparing the production of Colby Barlow to Brayden Yager. The two are of similar age, and the OHL and WHL are fairly comparable in terms of which players would move to the NHL the following season.
The weakness of NHLEs is that the samples aren’t exactly the same across leagues when creating the translation factors. The AHL, for example, has a wide variety of players, from prospects making the next step to journeymen called up to play a depth role.
For this reason, Lambert’s NHLEs aren’t exactly comparable to those of younger forwards.
Still, NHLEs provide a fairly good look at who Yager is. No, he’s not the second coming of Nathan MacKinnon (still can’t believe someone in the media made that suggestion). That said, he’s a top-tier prospect and was the most impressive junior league scorer in the Jets’ system.
It also highlights how impressive McGroarty’s season was in the NCAA this year.
Comparing Yager to McGroarty
HockeyProspecting uses ages and NHLEs to find statistical comparisons and then looks at how often those comparables made the NHL and became “star players.”
This is a good illustration of how important it is to consider age when evaluating prospects’ performance. There’s little doubt that McGroarty’s season was statistically better, but prior to this past season, there wasn’t much difference between the two.
That’s no knock on McGroarty or an attempt to discount his recent season. His 2023-24 campaign was very impressive, boosting both his stock as a prospect and the likelihood that he will produce well in the NHL. Yager performing similarly this coming season would be seen as a big step forward in his development.
Still, it shows how the door is wide open for Yager to develop, and we shouldn’t count our chickens before they hatch just because McGroarty had such a strong D+2 year.
JFresh’s cards, which use TopDownHockey’s NHLE model, paint a fairly similar picture to Byron Bader’s model.
Essentially, McGroarty has a higher probability of making the NHL and being a strong performer if he does, but most of that is due to the additional season of data—a very strong season.
If Yager makes a similar step forward this year, we’ll still be talking about this as a fairly lateral exchange.
Final Thoughts
A lateral exchange is about as good of a situation as Kevin Cheveldayoff could have hoped for, given the circumstances.
It also works out fairly well for the Jets in terms of positional need. Center depth has often eluded the Jets, both at the NHL level and in their prospect pool. This depth issue has also been fairly expensive.
In 2017-18, the Jets traded for Paul Stastny, giving them the impressive group of Scheifele, Stastny, Little, and Lowry. Stastny then left to play for the team that eliminated the Jets the year before, so the Jets had to add Kevin Hayes at the deadline. The year after, the Jets added Cody Eakin, a significant downgrade from the previous two pickups.
Stastny eventually returned to Winnipeg but transitioned to winger due to both his age regression and the Jets trading Patrik Laine and Jack Roslovic for Pierre-Luc Dubois.
The team finally had some significant center depth with long-term potential, but we all know what happened there.
Winnipeg seems hesitant to play Cole Perfetti at center, so they traded for Sean Monahan at the deadline. If you’re counting, that’s five times in seven years that the Jets have traded for a top-nine center. Six if you count both of the Stastny transactions.
Yager is a center prospect, and a quality one at that. With Perfetti on the wing and the consistent injury struggles of Chaz Lucius, the Jets were essentially relying heavily on Brad Lambert and hoping for a long-shot, out-of-nowhere development to counter the very likely and significant age regression of Mark Scheifele.
Analytics Overview Series: Semi-Repreve for You
As I’ve mentioned previously, both last time and earlier above, this series is taking a slight pause because I’m working on something.
The next steps in the series will cover various public analytical sites, models, and tools, with the ultimate goal of creating resources to help you, the reader, use these websites for in-depth analysis.
The reason for the pause is that I’m in discussions with some of these sites to hopefully offer some sort of value add or discount for readers of The Five Hohl.
The series thus far:
For now, to fill the gap, here’s a quick little analytical rant
Normal Distributions
Whenever you see those player card charts—whether it's an Evolving-Hockey card like the one above, a JFresh card, or from another source—most people will focus on the percentile numbers.
The offense, defense, and overall numbers on these cards are all percentiles. For example, 88 Overall means that Ehlers' impact was better than 88 percent of NHL players over that period.
However, one issue with percentiles is that people don’t intuitively grasp normal or similar distributions.
To illustrate this, I created a random, somewhat normal distribution of individuals. Most squares here, similar to the performances we see in the NHL, are concentrated near the average, with very few players in the extremes.
The gap in value between a 100th percentile player and a 99th percentile player is much, much larger than the gap between the 51st and 50th percentiles.
Take the three Ms—McDavid, Matthews, and MacKinnon, for instance. All three were above 30 Goals Above Replacement (GAR) value last season. Scrolling down about 40 spots—roughly 5% of the 879 skater seasons where players logged at least 5 minutes—we still find elite players like Josh Morrissey, who produced about 15 GAR.
That's about half the value just by moving 5% down the sample.
Anyway, that’s our mini-analytical rant/lecture/example for today.
Closing Thoughts
Thank you for reading my analytically tilted thoughts on the Winnipeg Jets. I hope you enjoyed it!
If you did, and you're still here, please consider supporting the site. Your support is greatly appreciated and helps us grow!
To further support my work here at The Five Hohl, please consider liking, sharing, and subscribing. For those who want to contribute even more, consider joining the paid tier. I offer an additional post each week during the regular season, plus other extras like manually tracked microstatistics by yours truly.