An Analysis Of Draft Success Beyond The Second Round; The Best, The Worst and the Dallas Stars

I was considering the plight of the Edmonton Oilers and their ‘interesting’ management when I first thought about this article. Why were the Oilers not doing so well? My first instinct was to think about their prospect management and development. Following that path, I wondered how successful their drafting was outside of the first two rounds.

One thing led to another and I went through the entire league to analyse their success between the third and seventh rounds, 2005-2014. I judged a successful pick as a player who had played at least 50 games in the NHL. I didn’t take into account any trades involving those prospects.

I used Hockeydb’s draft history to create these tables.

The results were quite interesting:

2005-2014

The Columbus Blue Jackets top this list with an impressive 16.98% success rate—twice the league average. Nine out of their 53 picks had reached the 50 game mark.

The Dallas Stars, who have started to develop a reputation for their late round successes, came second with a 14.89% success rate with seven prospects out of 47 picks playing in more than 50 games at the NHL level.

The worst in the league, the Canucks, haven’t had a single player—out of 44 picks—play 50 games in the NHL. This will likely increase to one when Kevin Connauton passes the 50 game mark this season.

After my first look, and analysis, of these numbers I realized that the number of picks from recent drafts would make the percentage lower across the board. To take this into account I decided to rerun the numbers but only from 2005-2010. I assumed that a lower round pick would probably take at least two years in their drafted league and two years in the AHL before playing. This limited my range to the six drafts between 2005 and 2010.

By doing this the percentages were obviously going to end up being significantly higher than the previous table. There were some interesting shifts in position as you can see in the tables below.

2005-2010

Only two players who were drafted after 2010 have reached the 50 game mark: Andrew Shaw (Chicago) and Ondrej Palat (Tampa Bay).

The figures that stick out the most are those top two percentages. The Dallas Stars come on top with 26.92% of its picks after the second round from 2005-2010 playing at least 50 NHL games. The Blue Jackets are a close second at 25.71%. Having over a quarter of those picks be a success is pretty astonishing.

It seems unlikely that Dallas and Columbus will continue having such high percentage success but if they were able to before maybe they could continue. We’ll have to see in another five years. In my opinion those numbers are just too high to be sustainable.

Detroit’s numbers, despite having a reputation for finding late round successes, are below average in both time frames, and are in the bottom 10 in the league. It seems their reputation is more myth in the past decade than reality.

Vancouver has only had four of all 61 of its draft picks (Including first and second rounders) in the past decade cross that 50 game mark. Thats an incredibly worrying sign for the Canucks. I’m not one to normally quote/paraphrase Shakespeare but there is definitely something rotten with the state of the Canucks drafting/development system.

The Winnipeg Jets/Atlanta Thrashers franchise just avoided the 0.00% success in late rounds on the back of Paul Postma’s 61 games played.

The Minnesota Wild would likely have appeared higher up this list if this had been done closer to the end of the season. They have a few players very close to their 50 games mark.

While a lot of the draft is considered to be luck, there is no real way of being able to predict how a 18-year-old will develop, these numbers are interesting. What are the Dallas Stars and Columbus Blue Jackets doing that is different from the Vancouver Canucks, Winnipeg Jets/Atlanta Thrashers and Florida Panthers? The difference in those numbers is substantial.

Why that is, I don’t know.

There are flaws in what I’ve done above. This method doesn’t take into account the impact that those individual late round successes have had. For example Luke Gazdic counts as one of those Dallas Stars successes. The games to push him over the 50 game mark came in Edmonton and he hasn’t had as big an impact as others, for example Niklas Hjalmarsson. This is based on sheer quantity of players to hit that 50 game mark, not the quality they were when they played in the NHL.

Nevertheless, it is still very interesting to look at how different teams have done when it comes to selected future NHL players in the late rounds of the draft.