Puck Lists: Top 6 NHL Draft trends, including USA’s rise
When it comes to the NHL draft, there’s usually plenty to look forward to.
Teams are able to sell everyone on the promise that this is The Future Of The Club even if they’re picking 25th and anyone they choose there will probably be two or three years away from making an impact at the NHL level at the very least.
But within that relatively small area in which teams can actually move to make themselves better, you can start to notice how teams are choosing to generally approach the weekend, in terms of improving their teams in both the short- and long-term.
With this in mind, it’s important to keep track of what teams see in the prospect pools they encounter at the draft each year, especially when it comes to how picks are valued by teams, and what that means for how they act — and interact — as the first round comes and goes.
This year we saw a few notable trends really start to arise that hadn’t been too prevalent in the past:
Fewer “impact” trades
At least as long we have a flat salary cap, draft weekends like these will probably start to become the norm.
The biggest trade of the weekend, from a money standpoint, was the Red Wings unloading Pavel Datsyuk’s contract onto Arizona. And that Huge Move Of The Weekend was in exchange for the Coyotes basically being able to move up four spots, and taking back a contract the Coyotes didn’t want (Joe Vitale’s).
The biggest trade of the weekend, from a roster implications standpoint, was Brian Elliott to Calgary, in exchange for a second- and conditional third-round pick (the latter all the way off in 2018). This makes the Flames better for next year.
The biggest trade(s) of the weekend, from a “being interesting” standpoint, was Montreal’s swap-out of Lars Eller (for Washington’s second-round picks in 2017 and 2018, so likely late-50s choices there) for Andrew Shaw in a separate deal for two second-round picks this year. But Shaw is a cap casualty and still unsigned, and while Eller is perfectly fine, let’s also not act like Montreal’s really going to miss him.
Every other trade was basically teams trading problem contracts or players (Kulikov is a bit expensive, Anthony DeAngelo is a project that might not be panning out, Beau Bennett would have been too expensive, Jack Campbell seems to be flaming out spectacularly, etc.).
This is a far cry from the days of Cory Schneider-for-a-first. And given the lessons teams are learning about how valuable picks can be, one wonders if we’re going to see more of them move to the Leafs-and-Sabres approach of stockpiling them whenever possible.
Finland
We have long thought of Finland as the land of grinders, middle-pairing defenseman, and elite goaltending. They could stay competitive internationally because they were so defensively sound and unlikely to concede that — unlike the USA Hockey approach we see these days — they could legitimately hang with anyone in 2-1 and 3-2 games.
Now, though, Finland is also developing high-end talent. Three players in the top five, and another at No. 23. Before Friday night, only five Finns had been taken in the top-five. Ever.
If this is the sign that Finland is going to both continue developing reliable own-zone players while also producing more high-end talent that can put the puck in the net at a level similar to what Canadians and Americans are doing, this is very much a hockey country on the rise.
It’s always been reliably top-five, but could it soon surpass Sweden or Russia? A few more drafts like this and the answer might just be “yes.”
Wising up on goalies
One of the big things that you’re basically always going to be able to criticize NHL GMs for is that they’re not particularly good at spotting goaltending talent. Look at any graph of “players who got into x NHL games” sorted by draft pick, and they’re usually pretty damn good at making picks for forwards and defensemen. For goalies, they continue to be all over the place.
Which is why you didn’t see a goaltender taken in this draft until No. 48 overall. It was the third time in four years that no goalies went in the first round. Only the Ilya Samsonov choice by Washington at No. 22 last year broke the trend, but still, that’s one goaltender out of 120 first-round choices.
And in all, only 18 goalies were selected this year, period. That’s out of 211 draft picks.
It’s starting to look like teams realize the inefficiency of judging long-term goaltending talent and are more willing to wait for these players to develop before acquiring them as free agents. On some level, it’s just risk aversion insofar as you don’t want to make a goalie pick and not have it pan out, but at the same time, it’s the smarter play to know your weaknesses and act accordingly.
Older players
It’s tough to say for sure how much this trend reared its head this year in relation to years past, but it certainly felt like teams — particularly the “smarter” teams — were using their later-round picks on players who were in the draft for the second, third, or even fourth times.
This relates back, one imagines, to the idea that the league might try to push back the age at which kids become draft-eligible. It’s an extra year of evaluation time, and an extra year of figuring out how this kid competes against his peers. Moving back the draft age is a bad idea (how are you going to tell a legal adult he can’t work in a place for another year?), but again, the risk aversion exists.
Think of it like baseball: You only get so many swings here. Early the draft you should generally be aiming to hit a home run. Take a risk, and if you miss you might look pretty bad. But if you hit, it looks like a serious tater.
Later in the draft, when it’s harder to find quality players, you choke up on the bat a bit and just try to get on base. You don’t need your fourth-round pick or whatever to be a major contributor, because if he does anything for you at all you’re ahead of the game. So you try to slap an opposite-field single and manufacture some offense.
Plenty of 19-, 20-, and even 21-year-old players were selected this time around. (Perhaps the funniest note of the draft weekend, for me, was that a 21-year-old the Panthers took late in the draft actually played for a minor-league Russian team that somehow used as many as seven forward lines in a given game).
That’s a trend I’d expect to continue for years to come. Teams need to manage their assets carefully in a flat-cap league, and this is just another way to do it.
College
There has never been a year like this for college hockey.
In all, there were 11 first-round picks from players either currently in college or attending next year, as well as another 50 in the later rounds. Altogether, 28 of 60 NCAA teams had players selected, and 29 of 30 NHL teams dipped their toes into that water. The lone holdout was Winnipeg, which already has a lot of college kids in the pipeline.
More interesting: Three NCAA-tied Canadian kids were selected in the first round (Tyson Jost, Dante Fabbro, and Dennis Cholowski), which set an NCAA record, and shows that there’s potential for even more development there. Usually first-round pick Canadians are the provenance of the CHL alone, but college is establishing itself as a reasonable route north of the border as well.
Even European college-bound players got in on the action, with future University of Denver Pioneer Henrik Borgstrom (a Finn) becoming only the second-ever NCAA Euro to go in the first round. The other was Thomas Vanek.
A recent study by the College Hockey Inc. found that 77 percent of college players taken in the first round from 2000 to 2008 ended up playing 200 or more NHL games. For the CHL, it’s just 68 percent, and for European players, it’s only 55 percent.
Americans
While 55 Americans taken overall is not an NHL draft record, 12 in the first round certainly is.
How about the fact that five of them came from the same St. Louis youth development program? How about the fact that Auston Matthews, from freaking Arizona, went No. 1 overall? How about the fact that eight of those kids played for the National Team Development Program? How about three going in the first seven?
Yeah, Canadians are going to scoff at that kind of thing, because “three in the first seven” is an off draft for the world’s premier hockey country. But the US is catching up more every year, and hey, look at that: only one Canadian went in the first nine picks of the draft.
Uh oh.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
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