It's okay to trade Matthew Knies
Recently in Toronto, there has been a lot of talk about acquiring Timo Meier at this year’s trade deadline to push the team over the top. Most of the trade proposals involve perceived top prospect Matthew Knies going the other way, and many fans have decided that a prospect like Knies is too valuable to trade at this deadline. While Knies is a good prospect, I think a decent section of the fanbase is overrating him. So I am writing this article to help people estimate what Knies’s NHL career might look like.
Draft Day Comparables
To set our baseline for Knies’s expectations, let’s use some statistics I’ve gathered thanks to Elite prospects (soon to be involved in a website I’m helping make) to see his outlook on day one. Right off the bat, I projected Knies to have about a 40% chance of being an NHL player, with a 1% chance of being a star point producer. While that may sound underwhelming, those numbers are solid for a late second-round pick.
I realize those numbers above lack context, so I am going to turn to a draft analysis classic to help people estimate the range of outcomes of Knies, prospect comparables. To calculate a player’s comparables, I used their draft year and draft minus one-year production, plus their age and some other statistics and used a clustering algorithm to group players. What did Knies cluster end up looking like in his draft year? Well, there is some hope, but it’s not exactly fantastic. (Note NHL player outcomes are calculated using only their first eight seasons since being drafted. This can mess with some late risers, so when a player like Ryan O’Reilly shows up as not a star producer, we can use our heads)
On the bright side, two stars looked similar to Knies when drafted. Ryan O’Reilly and Pavel Buchnevich represent a best-case scenario for the cohort. Plus, Nick Schmaltz is a pretty good NHL player. Additionally, Nick Shore and J.T. Compher have been NHL players at some point in their careers, albeit not productive ones. The problem is, after that, the cohort is filled with busts (Jori Lethera may also be a hit, depending on your definition). Worse yet, all of the hits in this cohort were either much younger than Knies when drafted, or produced more, or even both.
So out of Knies’s comparable prospects on draft day, we are looking at two elite NHL players, one-second line? player, a trio of depth options, and ten busts. That is a hit rate of like 33% for his comparables, similar to my model’s 40% estimated chance of being an NHL player. This is not a bad thing for a late second-round pick, but to call a prospect like this untouchable is nuts, especially if its in a trade for a legit impact player like Timo Meier.
Present Day Comparables
Now I know what you're thinking. Knies was drafted a year and a half ago. Surely we are missing a lot by looking at his draft-day comparables. You would be right, so let’s look at Knies comparables using updated data, comparing him to other draft plus 2 skaters historically. We will use the same process. This time grouping prospects using their draft plus one and two-year statistics.
So here’s the problem. Knies production has not really improved all that much, so his current comparables look weaker than he did on draft day. Now the best-case scenario is Paul Stastny, with some other good middle-six options like Nick Foligno, Tyler Bertuzzi and Connor Brown. The problem is the upside is almost entirely gone, and it has been replaced with a significant number of either straight-up busts or players who got a shot but never did much with it. Now we are looking at 33 comparables with fewer than 20% of them making a meaningful impact at the NHL level.
Plus, again, the best players in Knies’s cohort were younger and produced more than he did at the same age. So now we are looking at a prospect who realistically has the upside of like Nick Foligno or Tyler Bertuzzi, with the floor someone who can’t hang in the NHL. Again somebody like Nick Foligno is really useful to an NHL team, especially when he’s on his ELC. Still, it’s not like this kind of prospect should be off the table in trade talks. If you can trade this prospect as the main piece (presumably along with some picks) for a player we know makes a large impact at the NHL level, you do it without thinking twice. If he hits his ceiling, great for him! I hope he does. But given what we know right now, Knies does not belong on an untouchable list.