DRAFTING HIGH SCORING DEFENSEMEN
(June 2009)
A team’s best chance to draft an offensive defenseman is clearly in the first round.
So, if your team is drafting in the first round and is looking at both a high-scoring defenseman and a scoring forward, the chance to find that scoring defenseman probably falls off a lot more after the first round than will the chance at drafting a scoring forward.
WHO IS THE BEST PLAYER AVAILABLE
It’s my view that the whole point of drafting is to select players that you can’t otherwise obtain cheaply, which means maximizing your chances at picking really good players and recognizing that fourth line forwards, bottom pairing defenders and back-up goalies are better than nothing, but ultimately pretty worthless draft picks since they’re a dime a dozen in free agency. In other words, you don’t try to draft what you can buy at the Dollar Store.
it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to trade down unless you’re trading your fifth rounder for a sixth and seventh.
Drafting goalies in the top 100 is a fool’s errand unless you’ve got a guy pegged to go in the top seven and honestly believe he’s a generational talent.
defenders work out better than forwards almost all of the time!
teams should be pushing defenders up their lists all the time.
If your team’s philosophy is indeed, “the best player is the player who’s most likely to have an impact in the NHL” then when those “it’s close” moments arise, you push the defender.
DON’T DRAFT DMAN 1ST OVERALL
(June 2012)
NHL teams are astonishingly poor at turning high draft picks into elite defencemen, relative to how good they are at turning high draft picks into elite forwards.
NHL teams aren’t equally confident in their ability to identify talent at forward and talent on defence when dealing with 18 year olds.
Whatever it is, it’s inarguable that, despite the importance NHL teams claim to place on defence, teams shy away from picking defencemen high.
adding the surest thing possible is more important than trying to thread the needle and add someone at the position where you perceive your greatest weakness, even if he’s less of a sure thing.
DRAFTING DMAN BIGGER GAMBLE THAN FORWARDS
(June 2012)
It seems more likely that something else is going on here with the most likely explanation being that defensemen take longer to develop and thus drafting them is an even greater crap shoot than drafting forwards
Teams should adjust their drafting strategy so that they have a bias towards drafting forwards in the first round and focus on drafting defensemen with your later round picks.
DRAFT STRATEGIES
Since every good forward scores, the right draft strategy is to grab any forward who looks like he might be able to score. It doesn’t matter whether they are too small or lousy without the puck or have a hole in their game that would otherwise make them less than desirable.
1) Always draft a scoring forward in the first round and never draft a forward who does not have an offensive upside.
2) Fill the organizational needs on defense and in goal in the later rounds
DRAFTING DEFENSEMEN
depth roster players are mostly high draft picks that don’t achieve star offensive status in the NHL, and that most defensive defensemen of consequence establish themselves as NHL regulars by their early twenties,
While scoring in junior doesn’t guarantee NHL success, not scoring in junior more often than not predicts NHL failure.
The overriding lesson here, however, is don’t draft a defensive defenseman early since it rarely, if ever, works in your favour. The few that do work out almost always put up big offensive numbers in junior before turning pro.
DRAFTING DEFENSIVE DEFENSEMEN
defensive ability is probably overvalued in CHL defensemen, and that GMs probably shouldn’t spend early round picks on guys who exhibit no offensive ability
Scoring CHL defensemen turned into successful draft picks at a higher rate than defensive CHL defensemen in every single batch.
Non-scoring CHL defensemen carry a disproportionate amount of risk and fail to become NHL players more often than not.
EXPLOITING MARKET INEFFICIENCIES
On a macro scale, drafting mostly forwards and then exploiting trade inefficiencies on young defensemen and goalies is a strategy that would bring value. The math is there to prove it.
FORWARDS SAFER THAN DEFENSEMEN
(March 19, 2015)
Results at even strength are driven primarily by forwards. This is not to say that offensive play is more important than defensive play; simply that, in the NHL, the players who contribute the most to outscoring the opposition at even strength are first-line forwards, not top-pair defensemen
The difference between the highest- and lowest-tier forward groups was a 0.76 goal differential per 60 minutes, but the difference between the highest- and lowest-tier defenseman groups was only a 0.13 goal differential – six times less!
Good forwards elevate a team and bad ones crush a team, and the effect is more intense than that of their defensive counterparts
when you’re drafting, forwards tend to be safer bets to pan out as well.
When the call is close between a forward and defense prospect, take the forward.
The NHL is a forwards league, where most (but not all) good teams are built from the faceoff dot to the sides and back, and not from the net and out.
IMBALANCED DRAFT STRATEGIES
Can imbalanced drafting strategies be corrected for through trade, delivering higher expected prospect value than conventional thinking
One of the findings has been the volatility of drafting defensemen relative to forwards. Couple that with claims that forwards have more of an impact on shot rates than defensemen, and one would be tempted to claim that avoiding defensemen altogether would be a solid draft strategy
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