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When the Leafs get a couple of days off, bloggers have a little bit of extra time to take a wider look at things.  I’ve spent a lot of time this year watching CHL games, pouring over AHL stats and looking at the player development side of hockey.  Unsurprisingly, that has led to a lot of conversations about the draft itself and it was one of these conversations that spurred me to look into some draft outcomes.

Over at Blue Chip Prospects, I decided to have a look at whether teams are more successful at drafting forwards or defensemen in various rounds of the draft.  I took ten years worth of draft data and put each player taken in the first three rounds of those drafts into one of four categories: All-Star, Impact Player, Replaceable Player, and Bust.

1st Round Forwards
Click to see the rest of these charts.

The idea behind the post was to try and find out whether a team is more likely to find an impact forward or an impact defenseman in each of these three rounds, but some of the peripheral information that came out of the spreadsheet was interesting as well and probably has some important implications with how we should value pick assets.  For example, I found that about 84% of all players taken in the third round never end up making a meaningful contribution at the NHL-level.  Moreover, only about 5% of players taken in the third round end up consistently skating in the top-6 forward group or as a top-4 defenseman.  That certainly provides some interesting perspective for a lot of the HF Board proposals we’re subjected to on a regular basis.

The post itself has all kinds of information, pretty graphs, and clever observations so please take the time to check it out.


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