Liam Öhgren Quietly Had A Monster Season In Sweden

Danila Yurov typically overshadows Liam Öhgren in the Minnesota Wild prospect pecking order. It's been like that from the start, even though the Wild drafted Öhgren No. 19 overall at the 2022 Draft, and they didn't take Yurov off the board until the 24th pick. Even the Wild had Yurov ahead of Öhgren on their draft list, but they took Öhgren first as a gambit to land both prospects.

Since then, we've been living in Yurov's world. The hype forming around him is well-deserved, of course. He finished the KHL season with 21 goals and 49 points, ranking in the league's top 20 in both categories. Yurov set the record for most points in a season for a KHL player in his Draft+2 season and has the most points per game of any 20-year-old KHLer since Kirill Kaprizov.

Öhgren just doesn't have those raw numbers. While he put up one of the best seasons in Swedish Junior history in the year leading up to the 2022 Draft, those eye-popping numbers haven't translated to his country's highest levels of competition. Injuries limited him to 11 goals and 20 points in 36 games last season in Allsvenskan (the second-highest level in Sweden). However, he had a breakout playoff with eight goals and 13 points in 17 games.

As for his first true season in the SHL, whose regular season ended on Tuesday, Öhgren looked solid but not great. Playing for the ever-solid Färjestad BK -- whose success stories include the Wild's own Jonas Brodin and Joel Eriksson Ek) -- Öhgren finished the season with 12 goals and 19 points in 26 games (the injury bug hit again). Strong, but not the record-setting performance Yurov just had in his country's top league.

That's reflected in Hockey Prospecting's Player Comparison Tool, which gives Yurov a 45% chance of becoming a star at the NHL level and Öhgren's stardom odds at just 13%. 

That's not bad for Öhgren's part. But if you're into the whole Buyer's Remorse kind of thing, maybe you catch Jimmy Snuggerud (No. 23 overall; 21% Star Likelihood) playing for the Minnesota Gophers and wonder why the Wild would pass on a Chaska native for a guy whose point totals aren't as stellar. Letting him go to the St. Louis Blues, no less!

Models like Hockey Prospecting, which uses NHL Equivalency (NHLe) to translate points from other leagues into an 82-game NHL total, come under fire for a few reasons. For one, points aren't everything -- just ask Brock Faber, who never scored anywhere... until he started putting up numbers in the NHL. It's also an inexact science to translate even AHL points to an NHL equivalent, much less a junior or European league.

Still, these get used because points are the best, most available, and most strongly correlated to the NHL success metric we have publicly available. You can't find advanced stats for the AHL, KHL, Junior leagues, or pretty much anything that's not the NHL. They're tracked by companies that keep it on lockdown as proprietary data or dedicated independent analysts.

Except, luckily enough for us, the Swedish Hockey League. The SHL has Corsi and Fenwick data dating back to the 2015-16 season. While we can't find out how Yurov drives play for Metallurg Magnitogorsk, for example, we can figure out the impact that Öhgren makes for Färjestad.

It's a good thing we can do this, too. When we look deeper into Öhgren, we can see that he's a difference-maker in the SHL, and he might be more NHL-ready than we'd have thought otherwise.

Öhgren is simply a possession monster and is so against men in Sweden. Of all the SHL players with 20 or more games, Öhgren's Fenwick For% (the percentage of unblocked shot attempts his team gets) is 60%, tied for fifth in the SHL. Whenever Öhgren's on the ice, his team gets three clean looks at the net for every two his opponents get. Connor McDavid and Brent Burns are examples of NHL players who are dictating play to that extent this year. Of course, there's a difference between the competition that Öhgren faces and that of McDavid and Burse, but we rarely see that kind of dominance from a junior-aged (under-20) player in the SHL. Using that 20-game cutoff, let's look at some of the top Fenwick For% seasons from the most notable forwards to come through Sweden since 2015-16.

Carl Grundström (2016-17), now with the Los Angeles Kings, is the only junior-aged player in SHL history to control play more than Öhgren. Even so, Öhgren combines his possession dominance by nearly matching Grundström's stat line: 12 goals and 19 points for Öhgren and 14 goals and 20 points for Grundström. Oh, and Öhgren compiled these numbers in 19 fewer games.

That brings us to another important point: Öhgren's scoring is pretty impressive, and not just in the context of him being a young player. Today, there aren't nearly the number of point-per-game players in the SHL as you'll find in other leagues, including the NHL. Sweden had just two players finish with over a point per game this year.

So, scoring 0.73 points per game, as Öhgren did, makes him one of the league's top scorers. His scoring rate puts him at 21st in the SHL, which is about where Yurov ranks among KHL players. Notching 12 goals in 26 games gives him a goals-per-game rate of 0.46, which is good for second in the league, behind only 27-year-old David Tomasek.

Those 0.46 goals per game not only are tops among junior-aged players this season, but it's one of the best goal-scoring seasons from a young prospect we've seen in the SHL this century. Elias Pettersson, Emil Bemström, and Patric Hörnqvist are the only Under-20 players who've scored as frequently in a season, per Quant Hockey.

Öhgren's even-strength dominance doesn't just translate to gaudy but goalless possession numbers. It might be surprising that he ranked just 11th on Färjestad in power play time, with 1 minute and 23 seconds of ice time per game. He made hay while the sun shone, racking up two goals and two assists in his 36 minutes on the man advantage. Still, the bulk of his damage -- 10 goals and 15 points -- happened at even strength.

So we know how many minutes he played at even-strength and how much he scored. That means we can calculate his goals, points, and shots per hour and compare them to other SHLers. Since even-strength scoring data exists in the SHL back to the 2010-11 season, we can expand our look at top drafted SHL prospects (minimum 20 games) back a few more years to see where Öhgren's even-strength individual numbers rank.

Looking at this list, all you can say is Wöw. Sure, there's a sizable gap between the top two names (Elias Pettersson and William Nylander) and Öhgren, but placing third on this list in even-strength points per hour is still mighty impressive. Remember, Mika Zibanejad and William Karlsson are former 40-goal scorers, Kevin Fiala is a former 30-goal guy, and Eriksson Ek needs only one more goal to join the 30-goal club himself. 

Not to mention, his goal-scoring is No. 1 on this list, nudging past Petterson (who has three straight 30-goal seasons) and decidedly above Nylander (who scored 40 last year and is six goals from repeating the feat).

The State of Hockey is on full Yurov Watch, and they should be. Yurov is an exciting, dynamic player. But while Öhgren's greatness as a prospect requires a bit more digging to become apparent, Minnesota shouldn't be sleeping on Öhgren, either. Being able to score at a high rate while also ranking as a top player in puck possession metrics is a special combination, and Öhgren's done both in one of the toughest leagues in the world. He should be every bit as much on the radar of players who could make the team out of camp as Yurov this fall. It could make for a legendary training camp competition.