EOTP’s 2018 Consensus NHL Draft Rankings

The NHL Entry Draft begins on Friday, and EOTP has been keeping track of most of the rankings to come out ahead of the draft.

Some rankings have more correlation to how the draft will unfold than others, and no rankings are perfect so we combined 14 of the most respected draft rankings and used the average of them to get our own rankings.

This is our second year doing this. Last year out of the top 151 (there was a tie for 150th), 121 were drafted (80.1%). Out of the top 100, 98 were drafted. Only #85 Artyom Minulin and #97 Kirill Slepets were not selected.

The correlation of the rankings (315 players ranked) to actual draft position was 0.75. This year, there are a few things done to improve that.

The sources used:

Bob McKenzie (TSN, ranked 93)
Craig Button (TSN, ranked 100)
HockeyProspect.com (ranked 217)
Corey Pronman (The Athletic, ranked 74 skaters)
Scott Wheeler (The Athletic, ranked 100)
ISSHockey.com (ranked 180 skaters)
FutureConsiderations.ca (ranked 300)
Chris Peter (ESPN, ranked 80)
Prospect Fanatic’s Draft Software (ranked 200)
Cam Robinson (Dobber Prospects, ranked 130)
Canucks Army (ranked 100)
Crossbarr Consulting (ranked 100)
McKeensHockey.com (ranked 217 plus honourable mentions - see below)
The Hockey News (ranked 120)

All of these rankings did not rank the same number of players. And not every player was ranked by each source. This offered a challenge to normalize the rankings.

To make things truly representative, players who were not ranked by a system were given the last ranking of the source+10. This ensured that a player not ranked did not benefit more than a player ranked low.

(By making it +10 instead of +1, it actually helped the correlation of the rankings. We used +1 last year.)

As an example, Bob McKenzie ranked 93 players. Those not ranked by McKenzie received a ranking of 103. HockeyProspect ranked 217 players. Those not ranked were given 227, and so on.

There are two exceptions. Future Considerations ranked 300 players. Because they ranked so many more players than other sources, it skewed the rankings too much for players they did and didn’t rank. Therefore, players not ranked received a rank of 305 instead of 310. McKeen’s ranked 217 players. They also had 83 honourable mentions. Because honourable mentions are not quantifiable in an average, players who were honourable mentions received a rank of 230. Those who were not mentioned at all received a rank of 250.

Three sources (Corey Pronman, ISS, and Crossbarr Consulting) ranked goaltenders separately. Those separate rankings were not used in the average. Goaltenders had their averages based on 11 sources rather than 14.

The “Drop Off” column shows the difference in average between the person immediately above them in the rankings. This is useful to create groups of similarly ranked players.

You will see the averages get close together as you approach the bottom. That is because many of those players were not ranked by several sources, meaning the averages tended to be more equal.

The “Variance” column shows the difference between the player’s highest ranking and their lowest one. As an example, Rasmus Dahlin and Andrei Svechnikov received all the same rating so their variance is 0. Filip Zadina received a high of 3 and low of 5, so his variance is ‘2’.

This year there was little question as to who the top prospect and second-ranked prospects were. But the rest of the top-10 is very close together. The gap between third and 10th is actually smaller than it was a year ago.

At third overall, the consensus pick would be Filip Zadina. However, Quinn Hughes, Brady Tkachuk and Oliver Wahlstrom are all close with Adam Boqvist and Jesperi Kotkaniemi close behind.

What hurts Kotkaniemi is the variance in his rankings. The 15 spots between his best (#3) and worst (#18) rankings is the highest among the top 10 in the draft, tied with Noah Dobson who is behind him.

The draft has a significant drop off after the 10th player. In fact the drop from 10 to 11 is bigger than any drop in the two years we have done the ranking. Other significant drops occur between 29 and 30, 43 and 44, and around the 53 range.

The small drops are significant but the draft still has a lot of depth well into the third round and even some third round prospects have first round grades among them.

Below are the Top 150 ranked players. In all, there are 264 players with an official ranking (for a ranking to be “official”, they needed to be ranked by at least two of the 14 sources.) The Montreal Canadiens have, for the moment, picks 3, 35, 38, 56, 62, 66, 97, 102, 122, 128.

For more information on prospects, be sure to check out our prospect profiles here.