Study Proves Canadiens Draft Record Over The Years Among The NHL's Best
by Robert L on Jun 22, 2010 2:10 AM EDT
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For years, there's undoudably many hockey thinkers who thought to undertake such a studious work, but never dared considering the monumental task at hand.
What I'm talking about is an in depth study of all 30 NHL team's records at the drafting table since 1994.
Daoust, a friend of the Maple Leafs site Pension Plan Puppets, has done all of us who never dared, and every hockey fan in general, a huge favour by putting in tremendously long hours it must have taken to simply compile the data that went into such an enormous project. Folks will be pointing to this study and referencing it for years to come.
Consider first that the study includes 30 clubs, across 15 seasons, and encompasses upwards of 3000 players and you get an idea of the breadth of the work. It will most certain alter many an opinion and reinforce a great many others with its result.
Why I'm so ecstatic about this, is that I've often wanted to pursue such a project for myself, especially in light of how the Montreal Canadiens record at the draft table is often misrepresented without the benefit of comparison to other organizations.
Across the board, Daoust's study should be an eye opener for hockey fans, particularly those who unfairly castigated the Habs more brutal picks without considering that every team messes up, more often than is believed.
The focus of the latest work are specifically the years from 2001 to 2007, as seen in the table below. The chart, from left to right shows that Montreal, in drafting 56 players in those years, had the sixth highest rank of average pick (126) of all 30 teams. (Click on the image to enlarge)
When it is considered that in those years that the Canadiens have only once drafted in the top 5, theinformation, all taken together, shows that they have maintained a fairly strong ratio, among the best, of turning draft choices into NHL players
The average number of players selected in that time is approximately 60 per team, and only 7 teams have chosen 56 players or less in the seven drafts. It is then remarkable to note that Montreal have the second highest rate of conversion (42.9%) in turning 56 draft picks into players that have played in at least one NHL game, second only to the Bruins at 44.2%.
The results were based from findings at the Hockey Reference draft pages, which actually lists 24 Canadiens draftees as having played in the NHL. They are:
Mike Komisarek, Alexander Perezhogin, Duncan Milroy, Tomas Plekanec, Martti Jarventie, Christopher Higgins, Andre Deveaux, Jonathan Ferland, Andrei Kostitsyn, Maxim Lapierre, Ryan O'Byrne, Corey Locke, Jaroslav Halak, Kyle Chipchura, Mikhail Grabovski, Greg Stewart, Mark Streit, Carey Price, Guillaume Latendresse, Matt D'Agostini, Sergei Kostitsyn, Ben Maxwell, Max Pacioretty, and Yannick Weber.
The list does not include games played this season by P.K. Subban, Mathieu Carle, Ryan White and James Wyman, so Montreal actually had exactly 50% (28 of 56) play in at least one game.
Where it gets more interesting on the surface, is that the Canadiens have had seven of those players top the 200 games played mark, which ranks them in sixth place. This shows that while 23 teams have drafted more players, Montreal's numbers are no fluke here.
The fourth column, I'm at a loss to explain. It seems to be numbers of players who played greater than 50 games this past season. With only 2 Canadiens listed, I'm thinking it should be that's Plekanec and Andrei Kostitsyn. The next column shows one player having surpassed the 40 points plateau, which would be Pleks again. Maybe someone can clue me in here!
Column seven sustain numbers in previous ranks. Montreal drafted players have played a total of 3,495 games, an average of 62 per player, which ranks third.
I'd have guessed the Habs tobe high there, but not as high as third!
Lastly, there is total points and points per drafted player. Montreal total is 1329, good for eighth spot, which isn't too shabby considering who the Penguins, Capitals, Blackhawks and Flyers have been able to draft over the years. The other team ahead of the Habs in total points are Buffalo, San Jose and Florida, quite surprisingly.
In average points per player, Montreal ranks sixth with a 24 point average, again behind the same teams listed above, Chicago and Florida excluded.
There's no grand summation that I can make after this quick whip through these ranks and numbers, but one opinion I've always held is that the perception of the Canadiens drafting record is like many other things about the team - blown out of proportion. This proves it.
As you can evidence, when put against the records of other clubs, it is hardly so terrible.
A quick disclaimer - I've happened onto this work late last evening, and did not go through it with a fine tooth comb by any means. I've hurried to pass it along to you all so you could appreciate it as soon as possible. That said, I have not had the opportunity to study all columns with any great depth.
If course, there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances I've not perused this early in. For the time being I'll leave that to all you experts out there to break this down further.
What I urge everyone interested to do, is leap over to the Pension Plan Puppets site, don't tell your friends you visit a Leafs blog for higher intelligence, and peruse through all they have on Daoust's work.
Just kidding - give him your props, it is well deserved!
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nice article. we’re fixated on players “we could have gotten” – Giroux, Gagne, etc of the world, yet, we forget how difficult it is to simply one game in the NHL. Rookie drafting players is not our issue – our issue is both free agents pick ups (our pro scouting department) and picking 1st line players.
This study has been done a bunch of times. I was the first to do it back in college, when my work was commissioned and sponsored by the NHL. Compiling the information into a spreadsheet isn’t difficult. You could do the entire history of the NHL Draft in about half an hour. Add another half hour for formatting, another hour to do the formulas and your work is done. The author of Hockeynomics did it again for his chapter on draft success, which you should definitely check out.
All that said, it’s good to see people digging into the numbers like this. Too often, people just accept the idiotic media statements without questioning them.
Copper N Blue here at SBNation recently posted an article with much of the same info, but I’m having trouble finding it. There has actually been quite a bit of these articles the last few weeks on sites like this. I don’t have the links because usually the methodology is lacking, and I’ve already done the work for myself (and I’ve done it more in-depth and extrapolated the data much further…which stands to reason, as the NHL wouldn’t have paid for me to do something anyone with Excel and a couple hours of free time could do), so I already know the results.
It just kind of struck me as funny that you would pretend that this is ground-breaking work that had never been done before when I’ve seen at least ten other people do it since I first did it in 2001.
Would love some links! Although the man hours are being under-represented here. The formatting is a bit wonky and has changed year over year so it was a lot of hard work.
Pension Plan Puppets: A Toronto Maple Leafs blog and a group therapy session.
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Imagine if you had to do it the way I first did it in 1999, by entering the data by hand from Ultimate Hockey into a notebook. Or the second time I did it in 2001 for the NHL, when I spent an entire semester entering the data into an Excel spreadsheet because the data acquisition feature was so poor. Now, it’s just a matter of hitting Hockeydb and cutting and pasting it into Excel, editing the formatting a bit and setting up your formulas. I update my work every few years, just for my own personal enjoyment, and it’s amazing how much easier it gets every time.
Great find Robert, on top of things as usual.
Ian
by Ian Grant Cobb on Jun 22, 2010 10:16 AM EDT reply actions
I think most people would have agreed with this. The issue has not been the quantity but the quality. I think the Habs have done very well in picking NHL talent but have done very poorly in picking top flight players. When you draft in the first round, you should be picking offensemen that will be in your top 6 and hopefully top 3 and defencemen in your top 3 pairings. Picking in the first round players that end up 3rd and 4th liners (like Chipura/Higgins or Fisher) may be getting NHL talent – but at way to high a draft pick.
When was the last time the Habs drafted a bona fide first line player? They have drafted very nicely for the 3rd and 4th lines and even some good 2nd line players – but nobody that is top flight talent since Saku Koivu in 1993. The issue with the players we missed is that we so often, players drafted after our picks (particularly in the first round) have turned out to be top line players and top flight talent, while our picks languish.
It all comes down to the definition of draft success.
Would you rather have Zetterberg, Datsyuk, Franzen, Howard, Fillipula, Fleischman, Hudler, Kronwall and Fischer
or
Komisarek, Perezhogin, Plekanec, Higgins, Kostitsyn, Lapierre, O’Byrne, Halak, Chipchura, Grabovski, Stewart, Streit, Price, Latendresse, D’Agostini, Kostitsyn, Maxwell, Pacioretty, and Weber.
(throw out Milroy, Jarventie, Deveaux, Ferland and Locke. They add nothing to your draft success outside of tipping the scales in Montreal’s favour for players who either were called up for poor depth problems or had zero NHL impact).
This is a study in quantity and not quality. I have heard studies quote these type of stats to justify Detroit as a poor drafting team and using the rationale that because you missed on 1st rounders that Zetterberg/Datsyuk is a fluke. Looking at Montreal’s draft haul in relation to the Wings, does it look like Detroit is 25th – 29th and the Habs are top 10?
One draft represents the core of a perennial contender/Stanley Cup champion and the other is the core of a team that battles for the 8th seed every season.
If you have an average core and miss in 6 of 7 rounds but draft Franzen in year 1, Zetterberg in year 2, Datsyuk in year 3 and Kronwall in year 4 and they are the only 4 of the 28 players who make the Red Wings this study would consider them a mediocre drafting team, yet they added 4 impact players in successive years.
You don’t draft teams from scratch. A strong team in 1995 only needs to add a player every couple of years to keep a strong turnover. Does this take into account a player in the WIngs farm system who couldn’t supplant Draper or McCarty and therefore spent 6-7 years with a glass ceiling? Does it take into account that the Habs were garbage in the late 90s and players like Milroy, Jarvantie etc got NHL games because the Habs sucked? Does it take into account that almost 3/4 of these variable took place in an era where strong financial teams could have placed more money in free agency then scouting because there was no cap?
I don’t buy this determination of success. I could draft Hal Gill, Josh Gorges, Glen Metropolit, Ryan O’Byrne, Martin Biron etc and this study would determine that I had a great draft record.
What I would like to see is somebody like Gabriel Desjardins use the Wins above replacement value to determine the importance of a pick and see how many extra wins each player represented over their career to determine their proper value. Under that type of study Milroy, Jaraventie, Locke would be worth ZERO and Zetterberg and Datsyuk would be worth more than 80% of the Canadiens players listed.
If I’m not mistaken, this particular data table focuses on the period between 2001-2007. Over that period, Detroit were indeed a mediocre drafting team. If you pushed back to 1994 to include Holmstrom, Datsyuk, & Zetterberg, obviously their “pts/drafted player” metric would look much, much better.
by Michael Whitehouse on Jun 22, 2010 1:23 PM EDT reply actions
That is my bad I thought I read 15 years. Don’t know where I got the 15 years from.
Either way, it doesn’t change my point. This is about quantity not quality.
The Hawks scored 11th through 13th in every category when 2001 to 2007 brought them
2001 – Tuomo Ruutu, Craig Anderson
2002 – Duncan Keith
2003 – Dustin Byfuglien, Brent Seabrook
2004 – Dave Bolland
2005 – Niklas Hjalmarsson
2006 – Jonathan Toews
2007 – Patrick Kane
That is the core of the current Stanley Cup champions, yet Montreal scored significantly better.
I don’t understand how that makes sense.
When you look at total points generated by players selected from 2001 through 2007, Chicago comes in 4th, edging everyone except Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Washington.
Because they led the league in total number of players drafted over that period with 77, Chicago gets punished by the high denominator in the chart above. That’s why ranking on a “per drafted player” basis can be somewhat misleading.
by Michael Whitehouse on Jun 22, 2010 3:32 PM EDT reply actions
Ranking points doesn’t identify a quality player like Marc Staal or a John Madden type player.
Look at Florida’s draft record. It has them listed as top 8 in five categories and they haven’t made the playoffs since 2001. Weiss, Bouwmeester, Greg Campbell, Horton, Olesz, Booth and Frolik hardly inspires a fanbase to believe they have been succesful at the draft table.
I just find it inconclusive and flawed. I don’t think from this that anybody can definitively say that the Canadiens drafted better than the Hawks, yet that is what it implies.
I just noticed something else. The data table lists 1329 points for players drafted by the Habs from 2001 through 2007. I took a look at the Hockey Reference.com draft register and found that the 1329 pts includes all points accrued by these players on ANY NHL team, not just with the Montreal Canadiens.
So, for example, Mark Streit—a 2004 draft pick—has 214 NHL pts, but only 109 of these were for the CH. In this data table, however, the Habs are getting credit for ALL of his NHL points.
Another glaring non-Hab example: Philly drafted Patrick Sharp in 2001, but only 15 of his 245 regular season points came with the Flyers.
Can the author of this study confirm whether or not, in this methodology, the drafting team gets credit for ALL NHL points accrued by its picks, or just those points score while in the drafting team’s uniform?
Thx.
by Michael Whitehouse on Jun 22, 2010 8:56 PM EDT reply actions
I did a similar study at PuckProspectus last year:
Part 1:
http://www.puckprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=198
and part 2:
http://www.puckprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=213
I accounted for draft position, one of the trickier elements involved.
Nevertheless, the Canadiens also ranked 6th in my study, so I guess we’re all converging here.
Pretty amazing really how every media outlet in the city is on Timmins’ back for crass incompetence and any numbers-driven study holds the Habs up as a pretty good drafting tim…
Of course, a lot of the critics base their arguments not on an actual comparison with other teams’ draft results, but on the “ones that got away”. Over 8 years there’ll be at least 8 guys that “got away”… to 8 different team, meaning the scouting team is being compared to the combined draft success of at least 8 other teams. Small wonder they’re made to look bad…
When they’re compared with their peers, the Habs’ scouting staff tends to come out looking pretty good.
Now EOTP will have our own draft record to compare with. Scary thought!
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