Comparing Taylor Chorney To Denis Grebeshkov

As usual, when a veteran player is sent out of town for futures, it’s traditional for the local media to jump on board and tell us all which player will replace him. I still recall listening to some suit in the Oilers ‘brain-trust’ explaining that the reason Janne Niinimaa was expendable was because Alexei Semenov’s progress was so outstanding. Sweet, sweet memories.

In any case, while I’ve said my piece about the Grebeshkov trade, I figured it might be worthwhile to see how he matches up against his de facto replacement.

That replacement, according to Joanne Ireland, is none other than Taylor Chorney: 

Scott Reynolds already alluded to it, but the fact is that Grebeshkov’s results as a professional hockey player were quite a bit better than Taylor Chorney’s at the same age. I’ve posted those AHL results below, and taken the liberty of pro-rating them over 82 games for the sake of comparison. 

In fairness to Chorney, Springfield has been a disaster in his time there. He deserves that caveat, and it matters, since Grebeshkov’s teams in Manchester were decent and quite good (respectively).

That said, this isn’t a fair comparison. All that expecting Chorney to turn into Grebeshkov does is place the burden of incredibly difficult expectation upon him, and it’s highly likely that he’ll quickly be regarded as a bust by those who expect that output. He’s a decent prospect but there’s no reason to believe he’ll be as good a player, especially in the immediate future.