This month the NCAA passed legislation that allows CHL players and alumni to play NCAA hockey. As a result our scouts have been running into NCAA coaches at WHL, OHL and QMJHL games and even had one sighting at a USport game.
Today the OHL announced that Memorial Cup champion and top six forward for Saginaw Spirit (OHL) Calem Mangone has committed to Lake Superior State (NCAA). An experienced junior play with over 150 points in his OHL career who played a key role on the Spirit’s Memorial Cup championship last season.
NZ Scouting Report:
Mangone is an explosive winger with a quick processor, agile and shifty footwork and ability to change direction instantly. A heady playmaker he can push the pace or slow it down and pass around the defense – he makes quick reads and has the puck handling to breakdown defenders 1v1. He’s a bit undersized and most of his offfense is generated off the rush but he’s been excellent the past two seasons on the power play both as a shooter and distributor. The puck sticks to his blade – he can navigate through tight areas and create separation with both his hands and his feet. He finds his teammates through a crowd and has a quick, accurate release where he can read the goalie and place his shots making him a dangerous goal scorer.
The question that is front and center to NCAA coaches is what does this mean for them? How good is Mangone compared to the players they see on a regular basis from leagues like the USHL, BCHL and NAHL? For CHL players and brass how good is Lake Superior and how does a point per game player in the CHL translate to the NCAA D1?
We’ll do our best to break this down from scouts who watch QMJHL, OHL, WHL, USHL, BCHL, NAHL and NCAA to give some perspective.
Mangone comes off a Memorial Cup Championship which is the winner of each CHL league championship plus the host city team meeting for what is the most competitive junior hockey tournament in the world. He played a central role on that team playing power play and top six minutes and helped lead his team to the championship infront of a sold-out crowd at the Dow Event Center. So from an experience standpoint – Calem will have played a higher level and under more pressure than any of his junior contempararies in the US or Europe.
From a skill standpoint – that is a bit tougher to gauge only becasue the OHL, Saginaw in particular, plays a skilled, puck possession style which plays to Mangone’s strengths. The OHL is obviously younger than the NCAA but it tends to be younger than the USHL, BCHL and NAHL as well and has higher caliber talent at the top end. Now that is a double edged sword in the evaluation process in that he’s playing against first and second round NHL draft picks regularly at Saginaw which he wouldn’t face in the USHL, BCHL, NAHL or in the CCHL conference in NCAA D1. With that being said he’s also playing alongside NHL draft picks and in the Memorial Cup Championship game he was on a line with fourth round NHL pick Joey Willis (Nashville) and 2nd round NHL pick Matyas Sapovaliv. Mangone isn’t a passive player waiting for people to get him the puck so while he won’t have the same kind of talent around him – he has proven over his OHL career and can create his own offense.
It’s obvioius Mangone is skilled enough, fast enough and experienced enough to be a high level prospect for Lake Superior. To compare him to BCHL or USHL – he would have been able to play that level at 16-17 and likely matriculated to NCAA D1 by 19 or 20. Therefore, he’s a rare find for an NCAA program to be “uncommitted” at 20 years old with his level of skating, skill and hockey IQ. The typical 20-year-old uncommitted prospect in USHL/BCHL/NAHL are players who NCAA D1 programs either didn’t have room for or wanted them to get another year of development before coming in as a freshman. Compare that to the CHL who only allows three 20-year-olds on a roster; using Saginaw as an example, they have seven rostered 19-year-olds but will only be able to sign three of them next season so being a 20-year-old in the CHL is actually an accomplishment.
The closest comparison to all the non-CHL junior leagues in US and Canada would be the USHL and typically that league around 80% (+/- 5% depending on the year) of the points in USHL translate to NCAA freshman output. Meaning if a player in the USHL averages 1.0 points per game in his last year in the USHL than he’d typically produce .80 points per game as an NCAA D1 freshman. If that held true to OHL than Lake Superior is likely to get a 30+ point scorer in his first year. However that remains to be unseen – the USHL might not have the high end talent of the OHL but it has excellent depth and the style of play mimics the NCAA – fast, phyiscal, defensive minded and hard to score. We’d expect that the average points translation to actually be lower on average than the USHL for that reason.
The one thing we can say for certain is that Mangone will be playing against much older, stronger and faster competition than he has seen in the OHL. He’ll also be playing a far different style of play, one that frankly doesn’t suit his game as well. The CCHA in particular is an older league, it’s a heavier league and the style is more about getting pucks in deep and throwing pucks to the net and fighiting for rebeounds than it is about puck possession. There will be less space than he is acustomed to and he’ll have to make quicker decisions and create in somewhat chaotic situations. This all could be an obstacle for him and so while we think he’s a player who can compete for power play and top six minutes right away and improve their teams overall skill and playmaking ability – it’s not a certainty. He’ll have to face adversities there that he hasn’t faced yet in his CHL career – but given what we’ve seen from him at Saginaw we think that’s a safe bet and therefore has earned a 4.0 star rating. A 4.0 rating is a rare grade for a 20-year old in our ranking system because most 20-year-olds with a 4.0 rating would already be freshman or even sophmores in the NCAA.
NZ will continue to provide insight into CHL prospects who are signing with NCAA teams both for educational purposes and also to give context for what kind of players these schools are getting and where we think they fit in.
Photo Credit: Dan Hickling/Hickling Images