Personally I think the Belorussian league is better than the Norwegian one.
But regardless, the flaw with this discussion is so much more fundamental than that. There's a really oversimplistic view on these boards of "every skater's value is PPG * NHLe." Hockey is really really not that simple. Even in the NHL it's not that simple, GMs are realizing that simply putting together a team of really efficient corsis doesn't actually produce a good team. And that metric isn't a bad place to start, but it doesn't itself actually constitute a detailed analysis of matchups.
I heard on an NHL broadcast the other day and I agree that there are maybe 15 players in a league who drive play wherever they go, and everyone else is looking for a good club situation. There are a lot of different types of hockey players, there are offensive drivers, defensive forwards, space creating forwards, offensive defensemen, defensive defensemen, minute-eating defensemen, etc. Players can have a bad club situation which makes them look statistically worse than they are, they can have a favorable club situation which makes them look better than they are.
No one picked Kazakhstan to win 4 years ago. 3 years ago, Germany was the 2nd favorite behind Belarus. A lot of people, people here, were extremely confident that Belarus was significantly better and would win. No one picked Austria to win 2 years ago. Some of it is the variability of a short tournament, inevitably a small sample size. But a lot of it too is that there's just a lot that you don't know if you haven't actually seen these players. If the margins are large enough, maybe paper stats are adequate. Philip Granath will dominate D2A. Pretty obvious. But Philip Granath will dominate D1A? Just because he was a healthy scratch in 15 SHL games? That's more of a stretch.
Don't read into it too much. You are talking to someone who is dead set on the Polish league being better than Slovak one. Or that Sweden is a WJC relegation contender.
