EOTP’s 2019 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 third year doing this. Last year out of the top 150, 126 were drafted (84.0 up from 80.1% in 2017). Out of the top 100, 96 were drafted. Only #87 Luka Burzan, #93 Vladislav Kotkov, #94 Kyle Topping, and #96 Nathan Dunkley were not drafted. Kotkov since signed with the San Jose Sharks.

Previous Rankings:
2017
2018

The correlation of the rankings (217 players ranked) to actual draft position was 0.72. This year, there are a few things done to improve that.

The sources used:

Bob McKenzie (TSN, ranked 93)
Craig Button (TSN, ranked 93)
HockeyProspect.com (ranked 108 skaters)
Corey Pronman (The Athletic, ranked 107 skaters)
Scott Wheeler (The Athletic, ranked 100)
FutureConsiderations.ca (ranked 300)
Chris Peter (ESPN, ranked 100)
Cam Robinson (Dobber Prospects, ranked 166)
EliteProspects.com (ranked 93 skaters)
Next Gen Hockey (ranked 100)
Will Scouching (ranked 111)
McKeensHockey.com (ranked 217)
The Hockey News (Ryan Kennedy rankings, not magazine, ranked 120)
DraftBuzz Hockey (ranked 100)

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.

As an example, Bob McKenzie ranked 93 players. Those not ranked by McKenzie received a ranking of 103. HockeyProspect ranked 108 skaters. Those not ranked were given 118, and so on.

In order to improve the accuracy of the rankings and account for outliers, we have changed the methodology this year. The top two and bottom two scores a prospect receives will not be used, so rankings are done on a maximum of 10 scores. In order to account for this, players with less than five rankings are omitted from the rankings.

Four sources (Corey Pronman, Hockey Prospect, Elite Prospects, and Will Scouching) ranked goaltenders separately. Those separate rankings were not used in the average. Because there are less sources, goaltenders only have the top one and bottom one score removed, and goaltenders needed to be ranked by three sources to be officially ranked.

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. This also represents how close players are.

The “Variance” column shows the difference between the player’s highest ranking and their lowest one. As an example, Jack Hughes and Kaapo Kakko have scores of ‘1’ since their rankings were all 1 or 2. The highest Variance in the first 31 prospects is Pavel Dorofeyev with a difference of 67. These are the raw totals, not taking into account which rankings are counted or not.

The 15th ranked player is Moritz Seider right now. However, players are quite close throughout the first round.

The draft has several significant drop offs. There is separation after the top four, and Alex Newhook in 12th has a big gap ahead and behind him. Other significant drop offs occur after 27th, 33rd, 40, and 45.

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. The most intriguing prospect may be Alex Vlasic. He is ranked 50th, but has as many first round grades as services that did not have him ranked (three each).

Below are the 140 ranked players who qualified.

The Montreal Canadiens have, for the moment, picks 15, 46, 50, 77, 108, 131, 136, 138, 170, and 206.

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