Draft Day Article Part II - Commentary

To make an apples to apples comparison one needs to take into account draft position.

A lower draft position right now unfairly handicaps the numbers.

To do this quickly i've taken the average draft position and multiplied it by the avg. point per career per pick. The results change slightly.

Ottawa, SJ and Edmonton are now top 3. Rangers, St. Louis, and Detroit are the bottom three

Big movers are edmonton up 13 spots to 3rd, Islanders up 6 to 56th, Washington up 9 to 16th, and Toronto down 6 to 9th

Additionally the type of player is likely skewing the numbers. Is this only Forward or are goalies and defense counted?

Thought on other ways?

canada wrote:
Additionally the type of player is likely skewing the numbers. Is this only Forward or are goalies and defense counted?
I was thinking along the same lines.

It would be great to see these numbers broken down by position (F, D, G).

St. Albert Robo-Cops on Unicorns? What the hell? hahahaha

St. Louis really intrigued me, so I looked at who the players they drafted actually are.

They only had 1 first rounder between 1990 and 1997, and used it to draft Marty Reasoner (didn't they have to give 1st rounders up as compensation?). They ended the decade with Christian Backman and Barrett Jackman, two solid but defensive Ds. I wouldn't call either a bust.
Then come 5 lean years, with Jeff Taffe followed by two years of no first rounders, then followed by Shawn Belle and Marek Schwartz.
But the Blues really turned around their drafting starting in 2005: Oshie, EJ, Berglund, Eller, Cole, Perron. I see them getting lots of mileage and points out of these players in the next few years, and darting up the charts as a result.

But here's the stat I find most staggering about the Blues drafting since 93: of all the players they drafted from 1993 onwards, the leading NHL goalscorer is Mike Grier

Though, admittedly, Jochen Hecht has scored only 5 less despite playing 306 games less, so he should dethrone Grier by Christmas ... Rod Brindy needs 24 more goals to become the leading goalscorer among all time Blues draftees - the current leader being Dougie Gilmour.

yeah I didn't really take into account positions, I just looked at all the picks and churned out some numbers... The only one that included everyone was games played they had totals for G, D and F...

Yeah I didn't know how to tie in draft positions to picks, which is why I just kinda left it alone and did an avg draft position table instead to kinda help explain why STL was so bad and same with Detroit. It is a bit of an unfair comparision because Detroit always had bottom 5 picks and you just can't expect the same output as a team which had a ton of top 5 picks...

I just wanted to see who was actually getting the most mileage outta their guys and who wasn't I certainly didn't think StL was that bad or Anaheim that good...

but like I mentioned in the article there are a few teams that had their numbers skewed a bit too like Edmonton, if you take out Arnott and Smyth pretty much all of their first rounders have been flops. So one great player can certainly skew the numbers for a team.

Your numbers are heavily biased by picks in earlier drafts.

For example, if you take the total games played by players drafted from 04-07 it doesn't even add up to the total for the games played by players from 2003.

If you add up all the GPs and points and then take the pts/gp the numbers will be skewed.

For example, Washington drafted Sutherby (GP 304, pts 62, pts/gp 0.20) in 2000 and Backstrom (GP 82, pts 69, pts/gp 0.84)in 2006. Your numbers would say washington has an average output of 0.34 ppg making them a poor drafting team.

You could take the pts/GP of each player and then average that for draft position or team to directly compare different drafts.

Although I would argue you shouldn't include the last 3 years at all because it is easier for a young player to break the roster of a bad team.

yeah fair enough, I just didn't think of the most fair way of doing it and was playing around with the idea of what's the best way of presenting it... I just wanted to look at the past 15 years and say hey SJ got this much out of their draftees, and NJ got this much.

I meant it more to be just an informative article to show hey they really are middle of the pack at drafting and these guys aren't very good at getting the most outta their draftees.

In your example I think there is a lack of data because you were only using 2 player's data which skews the numbers quite a bit, but in my sample sizes the minimum was CLB and Detroit with 8 player's data. Most teams were around the 15 players mark. With most teams on the 15 players mark I think the data tends to sort itself out. Most teams have their good draftees and their bad draftees, it's on an avg that usually sorts them out.

But one thing I do have to acknowledge is that picks in the 90's a lot of them were later bloomers meaning it took them a few years before they got to 80 points, where as the young kids in recent years jumped to the 80 or more point mark in their rookie seasons so that helps teams quite a bit too.

I also agree with what you said about teams who rushed younger kids like Chicago with Kane and Toews getting the benefit of the stats compared to a Detroit not rushing a Brendan Smith... but nothing I can really do about that.