Oilers Prospect Projections - Yakimov & Chase On The Rise

In most leagues, the season is still very young and the Oilers' prospects haven't played enough games to give us an idea of how they're progressing in their quest to the reach the NHL. We do know, however, that Bogdan Yakimov and Gregory Chase, both selected in the 2013 draft, have started well. It's important for the 2013 draft to pan out, because the wreckage from the later rounds in drafts past have leached the forward depth out of the organization.

For a complete look at all of the Oilers' prospects and their NHL numbers, we can use Gabriel Desjardins' NHL Equivalency. Gabe's methodologies are described on his translations page:

One way to evaluate the difficulty of one league relative to another is to examine the relative performance of players who have played in both leagues.Players rarely play significant time in two leagues in the same year, but they often play in one league in one year and in another the next. As long as a player’s skill level is approximately constant over this two year period, the ratio of his performance in each league can be used to estimate the relative difficulty of the two leagues.

Below is the full list of skating prospects with their NHL Equivalency and full season projections.

*Curtis Hamilton remains on the NHL Injured Reserve

• "Functional Toughness" is struggling with the transition to the AHL game.
• Teemu Hartikainen is off to an excellent start in the KHL with Ufa and Linus Omark is the only source of offense for the Oklahoma City Barons. The two of them could really help the Oilers desperately bad fourth line.

• Darnell Nurse is off to a fine start, but we saw this one coming.
• Joey Laleggia continues to man the power play in Denver and offensive prowess sets him apart from the his competition, especially when he joins Oklahoma City next season.

For more on the players on this list, visit our

Top 25 Under 25 Hub