What do you think the success rate is for undrafted signed overagers? 0.1%?
Good question! Such a good question that I decided to find out. What percentage of players, with 100+ points WHL seasons in their overage year, has played 100+ games in the NHL? As they say, the answer may surprise you.
So I decided to go through every WHL regular season between 18-19 season and all the way back to the 94-95 season and look at every single WHL overager that scored more than 100 points within that time frame. I figured younger guys than that may just not have had time to reach that 100 game milstone, in fact some of the guys I did find may very well still be able to. And 25 years, a quarter of a century is a nice round number. Should be enough for a sample size.
First thing that hit me was... Like, how common do you people actually think it is that overagers score 100+ points? The way you talk about it makes it sound like you think it happened 20-30 times per season... In reality, it's like 1 or 2 players per year. The most I found 97-98 which had 6. Many seasons had none at all.
So how many did I find?
39. That's it. That's all of the overagers that scored 100 or more points during those years in the WHL. Among them, this is how it breaks down.
Players with 100 or more NHL games: 10 (25.6%) (Troy Brouwer 851, Tyler Johnson 671, Brett McLean 385, Mark Smith 377, Ronald Petrovicky 342, Stacy Roest 244, Brandon Hagel 211, Dryden Hunt 202, Shane Willis 174, Chris Herperger 169)
Players with atleast NHL game: 9 (23.1%)
Players with no NHL games: 20 (51.3%)
Sure, none of these guys are/were superstars, but they certainly played a meaningful role in the league. Also yes, the sample size isn't massive, but it's pretty far away from 0.1%... And MrHeiskanen's "1000's of overages that put up 100+ points" is obviously complete and utter gobbledygook.
And since you added the caveat about undrafted players, I looked at that too. That changes the number of players to just 19 and the ratio is now 3, 3 and 13. Which yes, that's lower, at the 100 games played ratio at just 15.8%... But it's still very very far from 0.1%...
So yeah.. I think some of us are vastly underestimating the accomplishment of Wheatcroft. Not saying I think he's a future bonafide star or anything... But he's far from DOA either.