In a recent interview, Seattle Kraken content contributor and Emmy-winning journalist Alison Lukan asked Seattle Kraken general manager Ron Francis for his impressions about this year’s Coachella Valley Firebirds beyond what we could find on a stat sheet. Francis answered by pointing to a youth movement.

Probably the biggest thing I think is that we were one of the oldest teams in the league last year, maybe top three oldest teams in the league. This year, we’re one of the younger teams. (We have) a lot of young players. It’s a very good league and you start throwing 19-, 20-, 21-year-old kids into that league and it’s challenging.

So the fact that they’ve not only been able to tread water, but excel has been exciting for us to watch.

Alison Lukan, From the Front Office: A Q&A with Ron Francis, NHL.com

In October, we noted that last year’s Firebirds team was the fifth-oldest team in the AHL according to data tabulated by Elite Prospects. At the time we eagerly anticipated the beginning of a youth movement with several 2022 drafted players (plus Shane Wright and Logan Morrision) arriving in the AHL for the first time. But we noted that it would be two more years before the “prospect pipeline” was full, and the team still projected to be 10th oldest in the AHL according to Elite Prospects.

At the midway point in the season, and in light of Francis’s comments, we thought it would be a good time to check in on Seattle’s young players in Coachella Valley and how the team’s depth stacks up against the rest of the league.

First, we looked at the average age of the players on all AHL rosters. We used age and game data from Elite Prospects to calculate an average roster age weighted by games played. We found that the Firebirds are the 15th-youngest team in the AHL, almost precisely in the middle of the 32-team league. The newly “independent” Chicago Wolves were (by far) the oldest team, as might be expected since they are not drawing on a prospect pool in the same way as other teams.

So, it seems the Firebirds aren’t one of the league’s youngest teams. But average age of an AHL roster is probably less indicative of whether the team is cultivating young talent than the number of games played by true developmental-age prospects–players young enough to still be on the ascent in their expected production curves.

For the purpose of this exercise I used “under 22” as my cutoff. (If a player was 21 at any point during the 2023-24 AHL season, I counted them as “under 22.”) This is a somewhat arbitrary cutoff, but it aligns with aging curves, as well as Francis’s reference to “19-, 20-, 21-year-old kids.”

Here are the Firebirds that qualify:

The list and production seems solid, headlined by Seattle’s No. 1 prospect, Shane Wright, but let’s put it in context. First, let’s take a look at how the games played by these players stacks up around the AHL (based on data pulled mid-week last week).

Here, we start to see what Francis was getting at. While the Firebirds are in the middle of the pack (tied for 13th) in terms of total number of U22 players with at least one game played, Coachella Valley has the fifth-most total games played by U22 players. Now, let’s take a look at where the team’s U22 players rank in terms of point production in the AHL.

The Firebirds have the fourth-most points scored by U22 players in the AHL. Broken down further to show goal scoring specifically, we see that the Firebirds’ young players have been racking up points more than all but a few teams.

In an effort to account for team context, I also calculated the percentage of a team’s total scoring point production that had been scored by U22 players. I found that Coachella Valley’s U22 players accounted for the fifth-highest percentage of a team’s total scoring. Another way of looking at this is to compare scoring points by U22 players versus the scoring points by the remainder of an AHL team:

Here we see that Coachella Valley’s 22-and-older players are scoring in the bottom half of the league, whereas, again, the young players are among the league’s most productive.

I was curious if the Firebirds’ young players skewed toward the older end of the U22 age range but found that the opposite was true. Among U22 players, the Firebirds group was the sixth-youngest on average.

Finally, I wanted to know how these young players were performing beyond just their scoring points. Unfortunately, the AHL does not make game event data available to the public, so play-related analytics are very hard to come by. One crude measure, on-ice plus-minus, is calculable though. It has many flaws as a statistic, but it does tell us something (at least directionally) about how these players are faring when they’re on the ice. The results are certainly interesting.

Here, we see that the Firebirds U22 players are right there at the top of the league in cumulative plus-minus. In other words, the Firebirds aren’t struggling while these young players are on the ice; to the contrary. In fact, if we compare U22 cumulative plus-minus against the cumulative plus-minus of the remainder of the team, we find that the young players are on the ice for much of the Firebirds’ positive play.

There are certainly confounding factors, such as quality of competition and quality of teammates that I’d like to analyze but can’t, given the available data. In any event, these results are at least consistent with the conclusion that Seattle’s U22 players are not only scoring, they are delivering a two-way game at the AHL level.

While the results are encouraging, we would caution against interpreting these results as a type of “ranking” of team U22 prospect pools, though. Of course, this doesn’t capture players playing in junior or foreign leagues. And, most importantly, it doesn’t capture the best U22 players who have already established themselves at the NHL level. For example, if Shane Wright had proven he was ready for the NHL last year, he likely wouldn’t be in the AHL and accumulating statistics as a U22 player for the Firebirds.

(As an aside, we tested what the production of each AHL roster would be if we assumed the highest-producing U22 AHL player on each team were on an NHL roster instead, and the Firebirds still measured up favorably. The Firebirds would have the third-most U22 points in the league in this counterfactual scenario.)

Nevertheless, as Francis said, there is certainly a youth movement afoot in Palm Desert. And there is reason to be excited about what those players might do in a Kraken uniform in the years to come.