Grading every NHL team's right wing depth

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On Monday, we graded every NHL’ team’s left wing depth. Today, we take another run at our talent tiers, this time with a focus on the right wing position.

Since this is a multi-part series – and I’ve already been advised by the trusty editorial team we will be doing a mid-year update, which is awesome news – I wanted to address some of the common feedback I received on the initial post. They break down into three common points:

1. Interchangeable (LW/RW) wingers

There are about 10 to 12 wingers who are interchangeable (left wing/right wing) and many more who have position interchangeability, but do not actually play one of the two sides at present time. This positional issue only exists at the wing, but in a few circumstances there are overriding changes that should be made.

i) Edmonton’s Evander Kane is the best example of this. Kane has played exclusively at left wing in Edmonton over 43 games, but has position interchangeability. He should have been identified as a left wing, not a right wing. But the blanket positional methodology I’m using – which calls the NHL play-by-play sheets and two independent depth chart databases for buybacks at CBS and CapFriendly – identify him as a right wing.

ii) The solution going forward is to aggregate both wing positions and grade out ‘wingers’ like we will centres and defencemen. It takes the positional noise out of the equation, which also exists to a significant degree when you start looking at plausible fourth-lines for about half of the teams in the league. For now: it is still zero sum, and so if a winger isn’t identified on one side (see: Los Angeles’ Kevin Fiala as another example), he will be on another.

2. Scoring doesn’t correlate to the talent tiers!

Th