Power Wheels: Assessing the long-term strength of our teams

This is the Power Wheel (tm). It is a visual representation of the respective strength of our rosters, with a long-term perspective. The wheel above shows how many of the top 140 skaters are on each team. Here "top" skaters is defined not by current performance, but by Dobber's ranking of players to own in a points-only keeper league (e.g., the KCKL). Factors taken into account: "predicted points for the current season; age; upside; proven/unproven; team bonus; proneness to injury; 'name' factor" (Dobber's rankings are publically available, I assume you are all aware of them and if not, can make use of google).

Dobber provides a few different lists - one is a top 300 that includes defencemen but does not factor position into the rankings; another is a defence-only list. I removed the defencemen from his top 300 and took the top 100 forwards, roughly representing "keepers" - i.e., 6-7 forwards per team, guys who should score 50+ points. I then added the top 40 defencemen, i.e., 2-3 per team, guys who should score 30+ points. 

Cutting off at 140 is arbitrary. It both omits many of our players, and it hides a lot of information by being too broad: G-Phil's Flyers and the Quebec Rordiques both have 10 players in the top 140, but we know that many of G-Phil's players are clustered towards the top end of the 140.

Here is a chart where we focus more on the elite end: the top 20 forwards and 10 defencemen (I did not have time to fill the pie chart with faces, honestly that took forever):

Now the disparity is more evident. Note that two teams do not appear on this chart because they lack any of the top 20 forwards and top 10 defencemen: the Vanrooser Canicks and the Wilkes-Benham/Scranton Parkers. Also worth reminding everyone that a pie chart showing the top five players in the league would probably be three-fifths G-Phil's Flyers: Karlsson, Ovechkin and Malkin.

To better illustrate the power skew, you could look at the numerical value Dobber assigns to each player instead of the ranking (e.g., #1 Crosby 275; #20 Duchene 128), but I started to do that and it was a lot of work and kind of depressing.  

The good news for the Vanrooser Canicks is when you look at prospects. 

(Note colours assigned to teams in this graph do not match those in the previous graph). 

For prospects, Dobber takes into account upside as well as how many years away the player is from the NHL. Some are already in the NHL - those are generally the highest on the list. The Canicks feature two of the top five in Valeri Nichushkin and Tyler Toffoli (who looked excellent tearing apart the Canucks last night). The G-Phil's Flyers (gasp!) and Patrik Stefans (uh-oh) are the only teams with no prospects in the top 30. 

Keen observers may note that only 29 of the top 30 prospects are shown above. Can anyone guess without looking who the top NHL-drafted but KL-undrafted prospect is? 

In conclusion, these graphs should be taken with a grain of salt, but hopefully they provide a bit of information for each of us take stock of our team and its future.