Stockton has been a fantastic pipeline of talent for this organization the last handful of years, lots of credit to the coaches and development staff. It's crazy to actually see a quality NHLer graduate every year it seems....
I've been saying this for a while now, but it's hugely due to Treliving. Treliving did a crazy ton of work to sort out the alignment stuff, address mental health and other addictions, provide off ice support and training in many things as well as ensuring that the farm team plays the same style as the big club to make sure the transition to the big club isn't overly complicated and difficult. He did this all with little fan fare, but IMO it's been huge in improving the quality of prospects and squeezing extra draft currency value out of the prospects.
When Treliving started...
Our farm team went from Abbotsford (insane travel schedule vs other teams) to Adirondack (basically as far as Montreal with no direct flights). Treliving worked hard with others with relatively little fan fare to realign our team to Stockton. Better alignment meant better monitoring of our prospects and more down time for the prospects to work on things, work on recovering from injury etc.
We started off with a coach like Troy Ward in the AHL. He played a style totally different than Hartley. He played vets over prospects to win games to try and find a promotion. We were losing prospects to lack of development, mind games and mental health. We replaced him with Huska who focused on development of prospects over winning via vets and also would deploy a style similar to the big club. Additionally, when players are sent down, I seem to recall reading the player and Stockton coaches are given access to data (video etc.) and clear instructions on what to work on so that the player can get a chance back on the big club again and stick.
We were losing players to mental health and substance abuse issues. Ferland was a guy who we were able to salvage via Hartley and McGrattan. We extended this to the player development camps and then the farm team. The last guys we lost IIRC were Parsons (mental health) and Emile Poirier (substance abuse). Players who make it through the farm system with these issues aren't as good as they can be in the NHL.
So I think these things plus the development increases the chance of success, no matter the calibre of prospect. The overall wastage of draft capital is lower and it also allows for a chance for these players to hit unlikely ceilings due to better equipping and development. This means higher end output and/or higher chances that lower end draft picks that reach the necessary tier to graduate, rather than journeyman. In fact, with this set up, internally developed journeymen still have a shot at the bigs (ie: Ryan Lomberg 2015-2020 before becoming a Panther in 2020-2021 season).
The biggest problem remaining is goalie development. Sigalet seems to be good at identifying goalie talent, but development and coordination of this development seemingly isn't his forte. Like, from what I can tell, he's very good at the fundamentals stuff (as reported by a few vet goaltenders), but poor on the mental (ie: Parsons, Rittich) and injury rehab (ie: Gilles) side of the training. Labarbera seems to be doing a fine job, but damn I wish we could steal one of Clark, Korn, Maharaj or Burke to develop goalies.
It’s how these lists are made more or less, who drafted the most amount of early picks. Now the big thing is NHLe within a pool, which equivalently means nothing
I understand NHLe... but pooling it seems... dumb.
For our prospect pool, I do recall that many flames fans were kinda crapping on it for quite a few seasons. That being said, I do recall there was a huge debate about how little draft capital that Treliving was pouring into the pipeline because he was trading it away for rentals/roster players.
TBH, I don't mind the fact we are doing well on developing under the radar prospects. It feels like paying heavier instalments and getting a refund after filing taxes vs remitting less and owing taxes at the end.