Magnus Pääjärvi, The Next Michael Nylander? Peter Forsberg? Mats Lindgren?

Sam Gagner is tracking closely to Dave Keon and Bobby Clarke, at least according to the numbers. Last week, I queried every NHL forward in history in search of a comparable for Gagner and came up with a couple of names that weren't previously considered. Today I'm in search of the statistical comparables for Magnus Pääjärvi, Edmonton's Swedish Sensation.

If you'd like to know who Pääjärvi considers a comparable, look no further than the conversation we had with him last Spring:

C&B: I notice on your website that you list your favourite player as Maxim Afinogenov. I was surprised it wasn't a Swede! What is it that you like about Afinogenov's game? Do you try to model your play after his game at all?

Pääjärvi: I love everything he does. His style, his speed, and technique. I try to learn details from him, like the way he gets to net and the way he skates.

Afinogenov is an excellent comparable in that he's lightning quick, possesses more top-end speed than nearly anyone else in the league, and loves to carry the puck; he even has the same knocks, most notably, that he has no finish. Though Afinogenov is a stylistic comparable, I'm more interested in statistical comparables so that we might have an idea of what the player is capable of moving forward.

The table below contains a list of the only Swedish-born, NHL-bound players to outscore Pääjärvi in the Swedish Elite League in both their seventeen-year-old season and their eighteen-year-old season.

This is some impressive company for a nineteen-year-old to keep. However, like the NHL, the SEL has undergone a number of changes and shifts in play over the years, so it's not fair to compare a player's production in 2009 directly to a player's production in, say, 1991. Thus, just as I did when looking for Gagner's comparables, I've normalized the production of all NHL-bound SEL forwards in their eighteen-year-old season. In this case, I used 2.75 goals per game per team as the benchmark (the SEL's average in the 00's was 2.76 goals per game), and then adjusted the numbers to show a full season's worth (fifty-five games) of production in the SEL. The columns in gray are the normalized and adjusted stats.

Below is that list:

There are nine players for which comparables are not possible because I couldn't find SEL league stats prior to 1976. However, the players that we were able to use tell quite a story. The Sedins and Markus Naslund are still well in front of our man, but Pääjärvi leapfrogs guys like Peter Forsberg, Thomas Steen, Michael Nylander, and Niklas Andersson to settle in behind a very familiar face in Mats Lindgren.

This paints a very different picture of Pääjärvi and puts his 18-year-old season into almost unbelievable territory as far as comps go. The problem in trying to find an accurate comp is that Pääjärvi is a left wing, and outside of Niklas Andersson, the seven closest comps all played center in the SEL. So we can say that Pääjärvi isn't the scorer that Markus Naslund was, or we can drop down and say Pääjärvi was a much better scorer than Kjell Dahlin, Mikael Renberg or Niklas Sundstrom.

The other alternative is following the numbers strictly and using Nicklas Backstrom, Mats Lindgren, Michael Nylander, Peter Forsberg, Niklas Andersson and Mats Sundin as his group of comparables. No matter how we decide to slice this statistical comp, it bodes well for Pääjärvi and raises his profile to heights not previously discussed for the young man.