Me probably, best player in the second best league on earth.
And he's a spare, he's fine in a spare role
nope, I just checked, it was a user now called "connor mcdavid", but he went by a different name at the time. his one and only draft with us was AAA 2013. His team was so bad that Mozyakin might have been one of his five best picks. And from there, you took him last year and then again this year. (I know people are loath to admit it, but I'm sure the fact that he showed up as an AAA pick the year before had something to do with him even crossing your radar in the first place last year)
A few questions:
- How sure are we that the KHL is the world's second best league? Does the AHL not deserve some consideration in that regard, or am I out to lunch there?
- There have been players in that league for more than a season or two, that we know damn well
are better players than him, such as Alexei Yashin and Ilya Kovalchuk, and he's outscoring them, so we should be careful about calling the highest scorer the "best player" outright.
- Should we be concerned about his international record? His scoring at higher levels is brutal. Compare to the other top Soviets who've played a lot of games in the past decade: Ovechkin, Malkin, Kovalchuk, Datsyuk... it's not even close. And no, he shouldn't have to demonstrate a level of scoring like them, of course, but top international players tend to get into a lot more games than 39, and score a lot better than 0.31 GPG and 0.67 PPG. I mean, we care a lot less about international play for post-1990 players than pre-1990, right? and if he was a pre-1990 soviet with those kinds of national team numbers he wouldn't have a hope of AA draft selection. (with those domestic numbers, sure, he would, but also a pre-1990 soviet with those numbers would have had far better competition when scoring them)
- Some comparable players who have tended to rank highly in the KHL/RSL scoring race over the past while, that have north american records we can look to:
1. Brandon Bochenski: Bochenski was considered an early calder candidate a decade ago, but petered out quickly. he managed 0.44 PPG in the NHL, and over a PPG in the AHL. He's averaged 1.11 PPG in the KHL over 4 seasons.
2. Aleksey Morozov: Morozov was a highly touted prospect who left the NHL during his offensive prime. He was a one-dimensional scoring winger who averaged 0.46 PPG over a good large sample of 490 NHL games. He's averaged 1.03 PPG in the RSL/KHL over a sample of 500 more games, and has gotten into 62 international games, scoring 46 points.
3. Alexander Radulov: He has scored a respectable 0.66 PPG in a very short NHL sample played mostly before the ages in which you'd expect him to be in his offensive prime. He's scored 1.26 PPG in the KHL, and 40 points in 50 international games.
4. Patrick Thoresen: He was more or less a failed NHL player who averaged 0.23 PPG and maybe could have stuck around as a lower tier player but went to the KHL, where he's scored 0.97 PPG the last 5 seasons.
5. Nikolay Zherdev: He scored a respectable 0.62 PPG in a short NHL career in which he was a highly touted youngster given every opportunity to excel for a team that wanted to be run and gun. In the KHL he has scored .67 PPG in 300 games that sandwiched his NHL career that included most of his prime scoring years.
6. Josef Vasicek: Vasicek was supposed to be an offensive player but struggled to capture that role in the NHL. He scored 0.38 PPG in 500 NHL games, and 0.84 in three KHL seasons.
7. Mattias Weinhandl: Another player that was expected to score at the NHL level but ultimately couldn't. He scored 0.30 PPG in the NHL and 0.89 in four KHL seasons.
8. Maxim Sushinsky: In a really small sample size, he scored 11 points in 30 NHL games and then left, citing homesickness. He's scored 0.83 PPG in a very large, 800 game sample in Russia. Sushinsky's 34 points in 56 international games represent a slightly lower PPG than Mozyakin, but in a 50% larger sample.
9. Alexander Korolyuk: Korolyuk was a classic "below average 2nd liner" while in the NHL pre-lockout, managing 0.47 PPG. He has averaged 0.75 over 700 Russian games.
10. Alexander Perezhogin: Perezhogin was once considered a good prospect, but managed just 0.27 PPG over a short career, and 0.61 over a couple of AHL seasons. He's averaged 0.64 over 600 Russian games, He's even scored in the couple of tournaments he's been in - 15 points in 19 games.
11. Pavel Brendl: A hotshot prospect turned complete failure due to attitude and conditioning, Brendl scored 0.28 PPG in 80 largely unearned NHL chances, and just 0.67 over 5 AHL seasons. He scored 0.74 over three KHL seasons.
12. Marcel Hossa: Hossa averaged 0.26 career PPG in the NHL, and 0.66 in four AHL seasons. In the KHL he averaged 0.63 points over 7 seasons.
Mozyakin has 1.08 PPG in over 600 KHL/NHL games and 0.67 in 39 international games.
what can we conclude from all this? Well, I made this a big post for a reason. It wouldn't be fair to just point at Brandon Bochenski and say "see? Mozyakin is no better than a failed NHL player, a Peter White clone who was overqualified for the AHL but couldn't stick in the big league". On the other hand, it's way too generous to simply conclude he's "about as good as Morozov and not quite as good at Radulov" because those are probably the two most favourable comparisons.
With a large sample size of data, we're able to take a sort of a composite image of what he might look like as an NHL scorer. Here's what I would say:
Mozyakin has clearly performed better than
Zherdev (who could have maybe been a minor NHL star),
Korolyuk (who may have forged an NHL career as a 2nd liner),
Vasicek (a decent but forgettable NHL player), and
Perezhogin, Weinhandl, Hossa, Brendl, Sushinsky and Thoresen (0.2-0.3 PPG marginal/failed NHL players)
Mozyakin has definitely not performed better than
Radulov, who was a pretty good NHL player that could have maybe been a minor star.
Mozyakin has performed at about the same level as
Bochenski (AHL/NHL tweener) and
Morozov (one dimensional second liner with first line potential)
I think that based on this it's clear Mozyakin could have earned an NHL job on merit if he wanted to. But is he a demonstrably better player than Morozov, who is about his equal domestically and his superior internationally? Morozov was nothing special as an NHL player and had he remained there until, say, 2013, would he be an AAA level player? If you look at the guys we've been selecting to play on AAA scoring lines, I'm thinking no (but I couldn't 100% rule it out). And Morozov is the
most charitable comparison in that he's a guy who actually proved he could cut it here. Mozyakin could just as easily be a Bochenski. If you split the difference between those two, while assuming we know enough to say he's clearly better than the Perezhogin/Weinhandl/Hossa/Brendl/Sushinsky/Thoresen class of players, then we're looking at a career 2nd/3rd line tweener if we're making an honest projection based on what we know.
LOVE the Moose! I've read some great accounts of how he dominated when playing with future-NHL stars (e.g., how he was much better than early-ATD drafted Hooley Smith when they played on the same line as amateurs). He's a solid early era amateur star HHOFer worth inviting to training camp in an extra skater role (maybe at the MLD level as well).
