For most of the 2014-15 NHL season, we’ve heard a ton of discussion about the bottom of the standings and what those teams have been playing for: specifically, draft prospects Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel, seen as potential franchise saviors for the clubs that "earn" the top two picks in the 2015 draft.

But a lot of the discussion misses the important question: What is the actual on-ice value those prospects bring to their potential organizations? How quickly will the team that selects them be among the Stanley Cup contenders? The short answer is that they'll bring quite a lot of value, but they’re not going to flip the fortunes of a team overnight.

Here are the expectations for these two in their rookie season of 2015-16, what kind of impact their new team should expect in the standings as well as the kind of team that may be just a McDavid or Eichel away from contending.

Expected production from No. 1 and 2 picks

Before diving into what McDavid and Eichel will do as rookies, let's compare them to other first overall picks from 1990 through 2010. The highest tier of prospects will be the comparables for McDavid, a list that includes Eric Lindros, Alexandre Daigle, Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby and John Tavares.

The next tier is Owen Nolan, Joe Thornton, Vincent Lecavalier, Patrik Stefan, Ilya Kovalchuk, Rick Nash, Patrick Kane, Steven Stamkos and Taylor Hall; these will be comparables for Eichel.

This minor separation between the two prospects has been consistent with my evaluation of the players all season.

To understand the value of this type of prospect, we look at the raw output these groups of players tend to produce immediately after being drafted. The following shows stats for both groups in WAR (wins above replacement) through their first seven seasons in the NHL (if old enough), or until they left their first team. WAR is translated from Tom Awad’s goals versus threshold (GVT) metric, explained here. What a WAR stat shows is how much output the individual brings to the team as opposed to a good AHL player, and that metric can be converted to wins in the standings.

For those unfamiliar with the scale of WAR in hockey, 0.75 is a league-average player, a WAR of 2 is a top-100 player in the league and a WAR of 3 or higher is a top-25 player in the league. Note that stats for lockout-shortened seasons have been prorated.

I didn’t make adjustments for late birthdates, and given that Eichel is a late birthdate player, he may be further along than some of the examples in his group. But one shouldn’t get bogged down in a few tenths. Most of these players ended up as upper-echelon NHL players, some among the league’s elite.

However, the very high production is not consistent across players and seasons. Some may argue that Crosby got hurt or that Daigle was a huge anomaly, but these potential "yeah, but" arguments illustrate the issues prevalent in hockey projections. Players get hurt a lot, the projections as draft prospects are quite uncertain and busts still happen; we may be seeing that currently with 2012 first overall pick Nail Yakupov in Edmonton. This is why projections for McDavid and Eichel may require some hedging for risks that are inherent for even the very best of prospects.

Impact of star players on team wins

Even though these players produce so much, how much did they contribute to winning teams? I chose three players from the McDavid group who were not Daigle and had seven seasons of work, and I chose one player from the Eichel group whose teams have had great success, as well as two who didn’t:

The correlation between team points in the standings and percent of output one of these players contributed to his team was minus-0.5. In other words, the better their team became, the less these star players contributed to the team’s success.

While these star players were very important parts of great teams, when the teams they were on were great, they often hovered around 15 percent of their team’s production. That means 85 percent of that contending output needed to come from other players.

Projecting McDavid and Eichel

In trying to project how much output McDavid and Eichel will have in the NHL, we look again to the previously mentioned peer groups. The "best case" line shows the very best season by any player represented in that group (and season number). One could read this as: The best-case scenario for McDavid two seasons from now is a 4.5-win player, while the average/likelier scenario is a three-win player. The former is one of the very best players in the NHL; the latter is a top-25 player.

The big question for fans of teams at the bottom of the standings is: How much will these tremendous prospects matter to a particular team’s future? The answer is they will be quite important. Either of them could single-handedly make a below-average team a playoff contender -- but not a Stanley Cup contender.

Keep in mind these projections are done in a vacuum, assuming the drafted player will fill a spot for a replacement player. In reality, depth charts could complicate matters.

In Buffalo, Sam Reinhart is very likely going to push the prospect for ice time. Max Domi could do the same in Arizona. Edmonton could slot either of the players in as its second-line center, even with Leon Draisaitl coming up. Carolina may have a clogged situation, with both Staal brothers, Elias Lindholm and Victor Rask, so someone may end up being pushed to the wing.

Toronto’s center situation will depend on whether Tyler Bozak is moved and where the Maple Leafs see William Nylander's future; he can play on the wing or up the middle. New Jersey is getting old and lacks many real forward prospects, so the Devils would likely find a high spot on the depth chart for either player, though Adam Henrique and Travis Zajac are fine players.

Impact on the standings

What follows is a table that uses the average projections for the McDavid and Eichel groups and turns them into points in the standings. End-of-season point projections for this season’s teams are done by mathematician Micah Blake McCurdy, and projections are as of Feb. 15:

As the Oilers have learned, teams can’t just lose their way into being a contender in the future. The draft does help bring in high-end talent, but teams need to do a lot more. A team like Buffalo still has a long way to go. While the Sabres could end up being Crosby’s Penguins, there’s a chance they could be Kovalchuk’s Thrashers or the modern-day Oilers if the rebuild isn’t pulled off well.

The 2006-07 Penguins emerged from the basement to become a contender with a brilliant season from Crosby but also a star-level season from Evgeni Malkin, strong blue-line play from Sergei Gonchar in his prime, a very effective Ryan Whitney, a good season from Marc-Andre Fleury and great secondary scoring from Mark Recchi, Jordan Staal, Ryan Malone and Erik Christensen. Christensen’s 18 goals and 33 points in 61 games that season could finish top three for the Sabres this season.

Buffalo has an elite farm system and could have the elements to help build around one of the top two picks this summer; the acquisition of Evander Kane is an obvious step in the right direction.

Edmonton’s system is average and it will likely need to find creative ways to improve from outside the organization -- or lose for a few more seasons.

Some lottery teams, like Carolina and New Jersey, could find their way to respectability with just a couple of additions, given the strength of their current rosters. If McDavid or Eichel lands there, the road to contention is much shorter than in some other spots.

The bottom line

Hockey is a different animal than a sport like basketball in terms of total output, mainly because the very best hockey skaters play a much smaller fraction of the game. Hockey is certainly more of a full-team sport -- one player cannot carry a team, outside of a goalie playing out of his mind. Basketball, with the same number of games played at the pro level, can have more than a dozen players represent 10 wins for a team in one season.

This is why rebuilds in hockey must be multidimensional. Recent studies have shown the value of great front-office management in baseball, and this concept also applies to hockey. The great rebuilds are done by getting top young talent from outside the top five picks of the draft, as well as getting value from trades and free agency.

In other words, it doesn’t take a genius to draft Sidney Crosby; it’s a lot harder to beat the market on the other fronts, which is how contenders in the NHL are built.

Without the combination of savvy personnel moves and proper roster construction to go with an elite prospect like McDavid or Eichel, a championship-contending roster is highly unlikely for whichever team selects them. These prospects can be the start, but they must not be the end.