How To Look At Brad Lambert In The 2022 Draft
June 30, 2022 by Brian Fogarty
Brad Lambert has long been a dynamic and divisive prospect for the 2022 NHL draft. As recently as last year, Lambert was considered a potential top-five prospect for the draft, but as the 2021-2022 hockey season played out he began to drift slowly downward on many rankings. As of the most current rankings by the major publications, Lambert has been ranked as high as 8th overall, and as low 42nd. The Hockey Prophets are more pessimistic than most, and have Lambert ranked at 45th overall.
In order to understand Lambert's ranking, the first thing to look at is his overall ability on the ice. As a hockey player, Lambert has an excellent set of skills that would easily make him worthy of a first-round pick. One of the best skaters in the draft, Lambert has natural speed that permeates everything he does on the ice. He can change gears with a single step, going from a pace that matches the play around him to an entirely different level of speed that instantly separates him from his opponents around him. With or without the puck, Lambert can shift gears up or down and in so doing, catch defenders off balance and on the wrong foot and simply skate around them. His edgework is highly refined, with near-elite change of direction, and he has that uncanny ability to appear to gain speed as he pivots. No one among the best prospects in the 2022 draft class skates with the same explosiveness and innate agility. Lambert is mesmerizing on the ice, and it can be nearly impossible not to watch him on every shift because he looks like he can break a game open at any second.
Unfortunately, he rarely does. Too many times, with the puck on his stick, Lambert leans too heavily on his skating ability and tries to beat multiple opponents at once. He can get by one almost without effort, but he tries to take on two or three, tries to split defenders with a change of speed, tries to deke and toe drag and swirl his way to the net, only to crash into a flat-footed defender or see the puck roll off his stick. The tremedous drop in his energy level when a play he tried has failed is recognizable and at times infuriating to watch. He can make a dazzling move, step around one opponent and then try a nifty pass that gets deflected or bobbled, and when that happens it seems as if all the desire to continue the attack just puddles around him on the ice.
Which leads into the second key part of understanding Lambert's ranking: his on-ice results. This year, Lambert spent the majority of the season in the top Finnish men's league, where he played for two different teams. He started the season with JYP, where he played 24 games with just two goals and four assists. He generated shots at an adequate level (8.4 per 60 minutes of ice time), but he only converted at 4.3 percent of them. His 1.09 points per 60 was 13th overall for JYP (fellow 2022 draft prospect Joakim Kemell generated 2.18 points per 60, mostly due to his 1.42 goals per 60 production rate). When the calendar flipped over to the new year, Lambert moved from JYP to Pelicans, a move that he said was prompted by a desire to make an impact on a playoff team. However, Lambert's production did not markedly improve, at all. In his 25 games with Pelicans, Lambert scored only two goals and two assists, despite a small increase in ice time compared to his play for JYP. His shot generation took a big leap, from the 8.4 per 60 to over 13.5, but his conversion rate sagged to 2.4 percent (among the worst shooting percentages on the team).
Draft-year players in the Liiga are not expected to dominate their teams in scoring. In fact, not only are U19 players relatively rare in the league, but when they do get significant ice time. they are not typically top producers. However, Lambert's production this year has him outside of the historical top 50 for draft-eligible Liiga seasons. Which leads inevitably to the next topic: Are there players from the past that have shown significant production similarities that could be looked upon to get some sense of how Lambert's career might unfold?
Digging through the statistical archives at Elite Prospects, there are a handful of players who played significant games at the Liiga level as 18 year olds who had similar production rates as Lambert. The five players who most closely line up with his production are Eetu Luostarinen, Iiro Pakarinen, Mika Alatalo, Aatu Raty and Saku Koivu. Of those players, Aatu Raty, at just 19 years old, has no career statistics to review, so other than his remarkable similarities to Saku Koivu's early production arc, his majority comparitive interest lies in the fact that he was drafted 52nd overall in last year's NHL draft.
Iiro Pakarinen (drafted 184th overall by Florida in 2011) played four post-draft seasons in the Liiga before moving to North America, where he played an initial season in the AHL followed by two NHL seasons in which he compiled seven goals and ten assists in a total of 77 games. Pakarinen then returned to Europe to play in the KHL.
Mika Alatalo (drafted 203rd overall by Winnipeg in 1990) stayed in Europe much longer, waiting until he was 28 years old before coming to North America, where he, like Pakarinen, played in just NHL two seasons. He scored 17 goals and 29 assists in 152 games over those two years, and then returned to Europe.
Eetu Luostarinen (drafted 42nd overall by Carolina in 2017) has been more succesful thus far. After following up his draft year with two subsequent seasons in the Liiga, Luostarinen came across to North America and played most of his first year in the AHL before being traded to the Florida Panthers. He has played the last two seasons with the Panthers, where he has tallied 12 goals and 22 assists in 122 games.
Saku Koivu (drafted 21st overall by Montreal in 1993) had a remarkable NHL career spanning 18 seasons with Montreal and Anaheim, during which he scored a total of 832 points in 1,124 NHL games while racking up an amazing collection of international trophies and medals--including induction into the IIHF Hall of Fame. Like Lambert, Koivu scored just 0.2 points per game in the Liiga in his draft year. Koive followed his draft year by increasing his productivity by more than five times during his post-draft season for TPS.
As for non-Liiga cohorts, Lambert's base Age/Production Score of 1.14 does not bode well for future success. Players with a score in that range have roughly a 10 percent chance of playing even part time in the NHL. As can be seen in the A/P Score chart below, Lambert's score is on the wrong side of the curve for NHL success.
Peak NHL production for the players in Lambert's A/P range tends to average at about .33 points per game, or about 25 points per season. That kind of expectation typically results in players getting selected at around 100 instead of in the first round. Based purely on the objective weights given to draft prospects, Lambert would likely be ranked somewhere in the mid-60s in the 2022 draft class. However, based solely on his skating and upside potential, the Hockey Prophets have pulled him up the ranking to 45th overall. His talent is such that the could easily be ranked much higher (as he is in many other publications), but the simple truth is that Lambert--at this point--carries a lot of probability risk in his game, and a history of poor production levels. As such, the Hockey Prophets have him ranked outside of the first round.
After all of the statistical comparison, skater evaluations and attribute conversations, the biggest questions when trying to look at where Lambert fits as a draft prospect all seem to get reduced to one key concern: Can Lambert replicate Saku Koivu's kind of production curve? Perhaps, but unlikely. His low shooting percentage and off-the-puck play--particular when things are not going his way--must be improved dramatically if he is going to have any success at the NHL level. Even more crutial will be changing his mindset and learning to rely more on his teammates rather than trying to make everything happen by himself. Statistically, his shot generation is excellent. He can create scoring chances for himself. However, shooting at four percent effectiveness will not do, particulary if he is unable to generate assists by creating chances for his teammates. Being an elite skater will allow Lambert multiple opportunities in his hockey career, but he must engage his competitive nature into making himself better at the aspects of the game that seem to make him the most uncomfortable.
Brian Fogarty is the creator and Managing Editor of Hockey Prophets. You can follow Brian on Twitter @hockey_prophets.
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