Is Griffin Reinhart Still an NHL Caliber Player??

The New York Islanders had a great off-season. The additions of Mikael Grabovski and Nikoli Kulemin give the NYI a solid top 6. The Jaroslav Halak trade and then signing addressed their biggest weakness from last season. They also had a great draft nabbing Michael Dal Cole and Josh Ho-Sang in the first round. One area they failed to improve upon was defence. There has been some talk that after winning the Memorial Cup that Griffin Reinhart is ready to make the jump to the NHL and help the Islanders defence.

So I took a peak at Reinhart’s hockeydb page and noticed an alarming trend in his points per game.

He has only one season above the 0.6 rate that predicts NHL success. Usually players who go on to play in the NHL are improving as they get older.

Jonathan Willis over at Oilers Nation wrote a piece on Reinhart and looked at every defencemen picked in the top 10 since 2000, and had an 82 game pace offensive total within 10 points of Reinhart in his draft season. The list included nine players; Ryan Murray, Erik Gudbranson, Jared Cowan, Luke Schenn, Karl Alzner, Keaton Ellerby, Braydon Coburn, and Dion Phaneuf. Not a terrible list. These players could all be considered defensive defencemen at the NHL level. What stands out is that every player improved their scoring rate in the following seasons, with the exceptions being Alzner and Reinhart. Alzner however still put up a ppg rate of 0.6 before jumping to the NHL in his draft +2 season.  

To give Reinhart’s season some context, beyond draft status, I decided to look for players who are of similar size and put up a comparable number of points. I looked at all WHL defencemen who were at least 6’3 or taller, scored between 20-40 points and were in their age 19 or 20 season. I did this for the previous two seasons. That yielded the following 14 players.

-Ben Betker

-Richard Nedomlel

-Sam Grist

-Mitchell Wheaton

-Joel Edmundson

-David Musil

-Duncan Siemens

-Jaynen Rissling

-Kyle Becker

-Brett Lernout

-Dillon Heatherington

-Mason Geertsen

-Mirco Mueller

-Ty Stanton

Not a very inspiring group to say the least. The only real prospects on the list are Mueller, Heatherington Musil and Siemens, and really it’s a stretch to call the latter three prospects. Siemens is actually an interesting comp for Reinhart. They both had good but not great draft seasons, and both saw their production drop in the following seasons. Siemens dropped from 0.6 down to 0.49 to 0.46. For what it’s worth Siemens’ struggles continued in the AHL as he only put up 4 points in 46 games for the Lake Erie Monsters.

Reinhart is clearly the better defensive player of the two. Defence however is very tough to evaluate. Megan (@butyoucarlotta) did some great work tracking the Portland-Edmonton WHL finals.  Her numbers showed that Reinhart was doing a great job of breaking up plays and limiting shots on net, the best among the Oil Kings defencemen.  That will have to continue to be his strength at the next level.

The lack of points though remains a concern. Rhys, as well as myself debunked the theory that defensive defencemen are made in junior. Most defensive defencemen in the NHL today were guys who put up points in junior.

With Reinhart being a defensive defencemen I have a theory that perhaps he was so focused on defence he almost forgot about offense. Much like Jared McCann for the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. We don’t have the same fancy stats for the CHL that we do for the NHL but extraskater still has some that can test this theory. The first is quality of competition. I would expect Reinhart to play some of the toughest competition in the league, which may be limiting his point totals. 

The way QOC is calculated for the CHL is that each player’s time on ice is estimated, then assumes coaches play their best players the most, and then figures out who played the most against those high TOI guys. Looking at the Oil Kings top 6 defencemen Reinhart did in fact play against the toughest competition. However since Reinhart never had to play against his own team his QOC looks rather pedestrian when compared to the rest of the D in the WHL. There Reinhart ranks 31^st. The top of that list was Josh Morrissey who despite the toughest QOC was able to put up over a point per game. As we scroll further down the list we see other notable first round picks succeeding despite the tough competition. Ryan Pullok ranks fourth, Julius Honka 8^th, and Derek Pouliot 12^th. All of them faced tougher competition than Reinhart and all were able to put up big offensive numbers.

I would like to point out that Reinhart was injured for part of the 2013-2014 season. He had surgery to repair a torn tendon in his foot, suffered during the 2012-2013 playoffs. The injury caused him to miss the first month of this season. However I don’t think the injury was lingering as when he came back he played well, putting up five points in his first seven games.

Griffin Reinhart is an interesting case on one hand the scouts love him, the stats however tell a different story. Personally, I hate to say it, but I see him becoming a bust in the NHL. He doesn’t show enough offence at the moment. His stats look rather pedestrian when compared to defensive defencemen in the NHL, and compared to current WHL players Reinhart is surrounded by many non-prospects. I think he will play in the NHL on reputation and his high draft status, but won’t become the star people expect. He will be a very interesting player to follow next season whether he plays with the Islanders or the Bridgeport Sound Tigers.