NHLe for NCAA divisions

Those familiar with this blog know our work on NHLe, aiming at rating over 50 leagues over the world in order to compare apples to apples when it comes to players coming from different backgrounds.

Our 2025 update was published earlier this Spring.

The NCAA as a whole came with a NHLe for Points of 0.26, ranking between leagues like the ICEHL (Austria/Italian/Slovenian pro league) and Slovakia. Ahead of the USHL 0.21 NHLe.

But a question from draft expert Gabriel Foley popped up in our DMs. What would happen if we splitted NCAA between its divisions?

Credits to Gab, but it was not the first time the topic came up, moslty from critics of NHLe back in the days : “yeahh but your stuff is BS because you can’t compare a guy from Boston Univ. with a guy playing in Alaska!”

Fair enough. But our thinking at the time was that the coefficient between the NCAA and, let’s say, the German DEL2, was probably made of guys playing in the Univ. of Alaska (no offense there, just a random example). And the coefficient between the NCAA and the NHL was built on the historical precedents of high-end talented players. So it did not matter anyway, unless a Big Ten guy decided to go play in Poland or Slovakian second level.

Anyway, following our chat with Gab, we gave it a go as it is Summer and Summer is for R&D.

So we splitted all NCAA players since 2008 according to their divisions and re-run our 5 years rolling, era-adjusted, Network NHLe.

Looking at where players went in their career after playing each NCAA season, we noticed there was a network within the NCAA itself, with enough players moving from Hockey East to the Big Ten, or from the ECAC, NCHC or Atlantic Hockey to Hockey East to create valid links for example.

The independent division was a sample size nightmare some seasons but it is what it is.

Here is what the model produced for 2025.

Unsurprisingly, the Big Ten is ahead of the 0.26 NHLe we had for the NCAA as a whole with 0.31. So are Hockey East and the NCHC.

The other divisions see their value drop with the splitted approach and the difference between the bottom and top divisions is rather impressive indeed.

Checking with Gab, he was pretty happy with the result.

I guess we will be using divisions NHLe from now on and drop the overall NCAA value.