April 28, 2009
NHL Entry Draft
First Round Selection Value

by Richard Pollock

Every year each team heads into the NHL Entry Draft with high hopes and dreams of finding the next Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux. As we all know, picks like those do not come along very often, so teams are instead faced with making the “right” selection in the middle, or at the end, of the first round. With teams putting so much emphasis on draft picks under the cap system, I thought it would be interesting to examine just how valuable certain first round picks are compared to other first round picks. More specifically, I wondered how valuable the middle ten selections of the first round of the draft are as compared to the bottom ten selections of the first round.

The reason I ask this is because the NHL, unlike the NBA or NFL, has to analyze its draft talent at a more volatile age (under 18). First off, the NFL only sees players drafted from the NCAA (with the odd exception) and the NBA only sees players drafted straight from the NCAA or Europe. The NHL, on the other hand, sees players drafted from the CHL, USHL, NCAA and the numerous junior leagues in Europe. Furthermore, the NHL players are drafted at 17 or 18 years old; whereas, the NBA players are drafted after at least their first year in college and the NFL draftees are required to have been in college for at least three seasons. This means that the NBA and NFL have more time to evaluate the players they want to invest their future in, as they are drafting players at older ages, which many argue makes it easier to project these players’ future value.

With such established players, slotting the value of these draft picks seems more cut and dry. While you may see the odd surprise during the first round of the NBA Draft (Hello Rafael Araujo) or NFL Draft (Hello Darrius Heyward-Bey), more often than not, the players selected are predictable and known commodities (to not only the scouts and personnel departments but the fans as well). On the other hand, you routinely see selections in the NHL Draft that are “off the board”. Selections like Blake Wheeler, Alexei Mikhnov and Devin Setoguchi came far earlier than many expected.

Think about it; how often do you see NBA/NFL first round picks not on their team’s roster the following season? It is rare. In the NHL, teams routinely have first round picks that never play a game in the NHL. In fact, 25 first round picks drafted from 1994-2004 have not played a single game in the NHL. That makes one wonder just how valuable a team’s spot is in the first round of the NHL Entry Draft. Is the 21st selection that much less valuable than the 13th selection? If teams routinely have one player at number 12 on their board, and he is a second rounder on someone else’s board, should teams place that much more value on a middle first round pick than a late first round pick? To analyze these questions, we will evaluate the numbers from the 1994 NHL Entry Draft through to the 2004 NHL Entry Draft. We won’t include the first ten picks of these drafts, as top ten picks are generally a sure thing and rarely don’t turn into at least productive NHL players.

Here are the numbers from players drafted 11-20 versus 21-30 for the ten aforementioned drafts:

Legend:

P/GP: Points / Games Played

                               1st Round
         2004      2003      2002       2001      2000      1999       1998  
	 P/GP      P/GP      P/GP       P/GP      P/GP      P/GP       P/GP  

11-20  268/823  1409/2478  776/1836  1046/2644  662/1740  469/1636  1105/3031	

                               1st Round
                 1997       1996       1995       1994
                 P/GP       P/GP       P/GP       P/GP

11-20         1102/1994  1221/3033  1759/4125  1395/4558

                               1st Round
         2004      2003      2002       2001      2000      1999       1998  
	 P/GP      P/GP      P/GP       P/GP      P/GP      P/GP       P/GP 

21-30  456/1060  768/1769  379/1421   436/1570 1069/2602  590/1357  1778/3251

                               1st Round
                 1997       1996       1995       1994
                 P/GP       P/GP       P/GP       P/GP

21-30         691/1822	 1141/2814    526/2152	 396/2464

While quantifying player production using points is certainly telling, I have also added games played as a statistic used to help determine productivity. This should (at least somewhat) help to account for defensive-defenseman and goaltenders when examining the baseline statistics (the amount of defensemen and goaltenders drafted over the ten year sample was fairly constant). Note that the draft selections from 1999 onwards include second round selections for the 21-30 slots because the NHL was not a 30 team league back then.

Now, these results may not surprise you, but looking more closely, they aren’t that far apart. Specifically, four of the ten drafts classes saw the bottom ten selections of the first round out-produce (in terms of points) the middle ten selections. Additionally, three of the ten seasons saw the bottom ten selections play more games to date than the middle ten.

Above you saw the year-by-year production, but now let’s evaluate the total production from the 11-20 draft slots for the past ten years, versus the 21-30 draft slots for the past ten years.

Totals	Points	Games Played	Points-Per-Game

11-20	11212	   27898	    0.40
21-30	 8230	   22282	    0.37 

So, the numbers indicate that there is an advantage of drafting higher in the first round. Just how significant is that difference? Well, if you average the games played to a per-season count, then the 11-20 draft picks play an average of seven games more per season than the players drafted 21-30. Next, let’s take a look at the points per game difference between the two. Taking the points-per-game difference and multiplying it by 82 (i.e., the number of NHL games per season) you get 32.8 points-per-season for the 11-20 draft picks and 30.3 points-per-season over 82 games for draft picks 21-30. That is a points-per-season difference of 2.5 per season. Considering the way the NHL is sometimes generous in its assist statistics, that difference hardly seems significant.

On one hand the numbers tell us that the higher picks are obviously more valuable, but on the other hand, the numbers tell us that the difference is not that significant. Therefore, if you are a fan who says you’d rather your team miss the playoffs and get a higher draft pick than make the playoffs and be eliminated in the first/second round, you may want to think again. Taking into account the value of that playoff experience, and the little difference in production between the middle teen selections and the picks in the early twenties, you should probably think again.

When you think about it, maybe this is one of the reasons why teams like the Red Wings, Flyers and Stars are able to stay at the top. Aside from the obvious need to be adept at drafting, these teams do not seem to be at a significant disadvantage when drafting at the end of the draft as compared to the more “valuable” higher selections.

So maybe fans ought to be less concerned with where their favorite teams are picking in the upcoming draft and, instead, be more concerned with who is making those selections.