We haven’t figured it out yet. It was a hard year with that perspective, and again, I was talking to Pat [Steinberg, on Flames Talk] yesterday, and the word we used right from the start of the year was ‘perspective.’

We had to have perspective, meaning the NCAA is bigger, stronger, older, mature. So guys going to play down there, it’s going to take them, they play less games. So you’re going to have to wait longer to have your evaluation, right? Like when Keaton Verhoeff goes to North Dakota… Like, he played 16 games where last year he played 28, I think, or whatever the number was. So you can’t make that decision or your evaluation. Sometimes the top players, you have your evaluation done in November. This is what they are. Then you sort them out versus the rest of them. When they’re going to college, and Keaton played the whole year as a 17-year-old, [Ilia] Morozov played the whole year as a 17-year-old. Oscar Hemming played the whole year as a 17-year-old. Tynan Lawrence went halfway through the year, right? So you have to give them time to get their head above water, get used to the pace, get used to the strength, right?

And conversely, the CHL is a younger league now. So there wasn’t as many overagers. So when we talked to the analytics department, like, is there a way to weigh it differently because it’s a younger league now? It’s not as good. there’s not as many older players, and so we’re not quite there yet in how we’re going to analyze it at the end of the year, but at the end of the day, the top players still have a quick hand. You see it in tight, right? And are the numbers skewed? It’s one of our biggest challenges with analytics and amateur scouting. We don’t have player tracking in amateur scouting. We’re watching a kid play in the Swedish Hockey League in Frolunda, and you got a kid playing 20 games in Edina high school. Like, it doesn’t equal in the analytics department. You can’t say our rankings are the same. That’s the hardest part is taking the leagues, the ages, and trying to put that into one pie in analytics.

So we’re working on it. We’re trying. I didn’t talk about it all the time, but it was a challenge this year, and I think it will level off after a couple of years, but that was a big challenge for us. Both looking at the CHL and being younger and knowing how hard it was going to be to play college hockey. The other thing about those kids, like college hockey players, you know those guys are going to be a target. You know, like Keaton Verhoeff, they’re going to challenge him. You’re going to, ‘oh, I’m going to take an extra run and I’m going to see what he’s made of.’ Cole Reschny is down there. He’ll tell you, it was hard at the start, but we knew, ‘just get your head above water, by the end of the year, you’ll be used to the pace and everything, how fast you have to do things,’ and he was. So it’s a good question, but it’s still ongoing.