For my first Deep Dive, I’m going to be diving into the Quebec City Citadelle’s rookies, comparing them to the veteran Citadelles that they will be replacing in the future, and trying to decide whether they will live up to the billing of their mentors or not.

Center: S57 Igor Petrov - S55 Stan Q Next
I figured I’d start with my own player, Igor “PP” Petrov. Igor has his work cut out for him if he wants to match Stan’s career. In the first IRL month of existence of the two players, Stan earned his way to 218 TPE, while Igor earned his way to 217 TPE. Not a bad start! Now let’s take a look at the players themselves. In Stan’s first season, he had 8 points, compared to the youngest Petrov brother’s rookie total of 20 points. Now obviously those numbers aren’t *completely* comparable because circumstances are different, but it’s interesting to see how well Petrov performed compared to the start of his superior’s career. I think that this bodes well for Igor’s future!


Goalie: S57 Tyler Ward - S56 Mat Smith
Let’s take a look at the goalies! I’m going to compare their first seasons in the SMJHL, so again, not 100% comparable because of differing circumstances, but Tyler Ward honestly had a better rookie season than Mat Smith did. Tyler had a smaller sample size, only appearing in 15 games compared to Mat’s 23, but Ward actually had a better save % by 1.8%, and had a better record as well. This can partially be attributed to having a better defense as a whole, but I think that it’s definitely still impressive and worth mentioning.


Defender: S57 Jari Heikkinen - S56 Jasper Maximov
The rookie years of these two players are definitely the most similar that we’ve looked at so far. They were only two points apart (with Heikkinen having the upper hand), 7 hits apart (with Maximov besting Heikkinen here), and their ratings were also strikingly similar. Jasper Maximov easily outplayed Heikkinen in power play stats, but Jari Heikkinen easily bested Maximov in terms of shots on goal, with 87 compared to 66. The volume is there, so if Jari can start hitting on more of those, he will easily overtake Maximov in goals. Maximov also seemed to have a bit of a turnover problem with more giveaways than takeaways (33 giveaways and 14 takeaways), and Heikkinen had no issues there, with 14 giveaways compared to 18 takeaways. One thing that impresses me is that Jari Heikkinen managed to match or best a lot of Maximov’s numbers, but he did it on slightly less average time on the ice. At the very least, Jari Heikkinen is on track to have a similar career path as Jasper Maximov, and that definitely isn’t a bad thing!


Winger: S57 Mikael Koskinen - S55 Ryan Rieley
These two were also pretty similar in certain ways, albeit not quite as similar as Heikkinen and Maximov were. Reading right to left, the points look pretty similar, and the first thing that jumps out to you is Rieley’s penalties in minutes completely dwarfing Koskinen’s. Koskinen definitely isn’t as aggressive as Rieley is, and these penalty minutes were probably correlated with Rieley’s large number of hits, 99. On the other hand, Koskinen only had 20 hits. I don’t necessarily think that Koskinen needs to be quite as aggressive as Rieley, but maybe there’s a happy middle in there somewhere. Koskinen’s other statistic that doesn’t quite match up to Rieley’s is his shooting percentage. Koskinen’s shooting percentage isn’t horrible, at just under 9%, but Rieley’s was much better at 14.04%. Koskinen did do much better in the giveaways and takeaways though Rieley had a -17 difference, and Koskinen only had a -6 difference. I don’t think Koskinen is off to a bad start, but there are some things that he can improve on in the future.

Overall, I really like my fellow rookies on the team, and think that we will all be able to do our part in helping QCC to accomplish its goals!

APPROVED +5 TPE @TheCC