In September of 2015, I published an article about the league strength in Europe to help settle an argument in the Eyes On The Prize comment section about which league was the best to develop a prospect in. I was using one-and-a-half seasons of group-stage data from the Champions Hockey League (CHL), and had only one year of playoff action in my analysis. Now with four full seasons of data to work with, I decided to go back and see if there had been any changes to the league rankings.
Three years ago, the league rankings, based on a points system for the CHL results, looked like this:
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Two nations were in a league of their own, with three more teams in the next tier, including one outlier in Norway.