By Dan David, HockeyDraftCentral.com
With so many draft guides available online, it's easy to get caught up in rankings and expect that these rankings reflect what actual NHL scouts are thinking.
For starters, this is not the case. While all NHL scouting staffs subscribe to various draft guides and certainly read them, the process by which an NHL team chooses players has nothing to do with the publications fans rifle through on draft day.
When it comes to making decisions about prospects, NHL scouting departments don't take some third party's word for it. If they did, they'd be running themselves out of their jobs. Instead, NHL scouting staffs spend thousands of hours seeing these players for themselves and making their own decisions based on their teams' overall scouting philosophies.
Unlike fans with draft guides, NHL teams don't bring lists of hundreds of prospects to the draft table. They bring final lists of players they specifically want, regardless of draft-guide rankings. A good scouting staff will bring a list of 100 or fewer players to the table. By the end of seven rounds, each one of their picks will have come off that list. They could care less where anyone else ranked these players.
If teams aren't using the draft guides to make their picks, fans are
certainly using them to learn about the drafted players. If you're among
those fans, you'll want to bear some things in mind before you get too
excited about them..
At the top end, draft guides are generally right
and reflect the early portions of the first round. However, it's just as
important to understand that a lot of prominent names in those draft guides
will never come close to being the NHL players their rankings suggest.
To see just how dramatic these differences between projection and
reality are, I decided to look back on the 2007 NHL Entry Draft with the
help of three major draft guides published at the time -- The Hockey
News, Red Line Report, and International Scouting Services (ISS).
I also took The Hockey News' 2017 first-round re-draft of the
players in the 2007 draft pool based on their performance in the 10 years
since draft day. What I found was eye-opening.
You
might remember Draft Day 2007 in Columbus as the "Patrick Kane Draft". There
were some high-quality players in the first round, but no one came close to
Kane, who has clearly demonstrated that as an NHL star. All three draft
guides had Kane ranked No. 1, so he was a no-brainer like Rasmus Dahlin is a
no-brainer this year Needless to say, in its 2017 re-draft, The Hockey
News
also ranked Kane No. 1.
After Kane, it gets interesting. The
second-best player from the 2007 draft, according to The Hockey News,
was Jamie Benn -- a fifth-round choice in his draft year. Did any of these
draft guides have Benn in its top 100? No. So the No. 2 NHLer from the 2007
draft was not even on these draft guides' radar. Think about that. It means
that the second-best player from this year's draft is not
necessarily someone you'll be reading about in the draft guides.
On
to the third-most valuable selection in 2007 -- Montreal's choice of P.K.
Subban in the second round. Bravo, Canadiens, you saw something the draft
guides didn't see. None of the three guides mentioned had Subban in its top
90, and only two had him in their top 100.
At No. 4 is Max Pacioretty
-- a first-rounder by Montreal. Only two of the three guides projected him
as a first-rounder, and his highest ranking was No. 14.
Next is yet
another Habs pick -- Ryan McDonagh at No. 5. All three draft guides
projected him as a first-rounder, but his best pre-draft ranking was at No.
19.
So you get the point. Based on The Hockey News' 2017
list of the best players taken in the 2007 draft, we discover the following:
Eleven of the 30 best were not ranked in any of the guides' top 100
players on draft day. This group includes Benn, Wayne Simmonds, Jake Muzzin,
Alec Martinez, and Carl Hagelin. Another four were not ranked in any of the
guides' first-round projections. In other words, half of the players who
made the 2017 list were not considered first-rounders by these draft guides
in their actual draft-year.
As far as busts, all three guides'
first-round projections had Alexei Cherepanov (who died tragically the
following year) ranked high. We'll never know how he might have turned out,
but we do know that each list had at least three players who never played a
single NHL game and another five who played in fewer than 25 games. In other
words, a minimum of eight of 30 were complete busts.
Remember names
like Angelo Esposito, Logan MacMillan, and Patrick White?
They were all projected by draft guides to be worthy of a first-round pick,
and all three were taken in the 2007 first round, but ... none reached the
NHL over the next 11 years. Think about that as you look at this year's
rankings. Which guys are the Esposito, MacMillan and White of this year's
draft? They are out there for sure.
Which guide did the best in 2007?
Well, if you were looking for the best ranking of the 30 players who would
go on to make the 2017 list, then your winner is Red Line Report by a nose
over ISS. Red Line reached on Ian Cole and got it right, but that guide also
reached on Sergei Korostin, Maxime Tanguay, and Nico Sachetti in addition to
Esposito and MacMillan.
We know what happened to those reaches. The Hockey News, meanwhile,
reached on four players that completely busted (zero NHL games), and ISS
reached on only three. Maybe fans in 2007 should
have chosen to rely on ISS for its "safer" picks.
The point here
is that outside of the no-brainer picks at the top of the draft, anything
can happen to the vast majority of players these guides are promoting as
future NHL regulars. There are plenty of inevitable busts in these rankings,
but you'd have to be psychic to know exactly who they are.
Unfortunately, we'll have to check back in 2028 to see how well this year's draft guides performed.