SHOULD YOU DRAFT A GOALIE 1ST ROUND
(May 2009)
Just how valuable drafting a goaltender high in the draft can be? It seemed like for every Marc-Andre Fleury listed at the top of a draft class, I’d see a Pekka Rinne drafted in the last round.
To be fair, analyzing goaltenders has always been considered by many to be a very, very tricky task. Many times a goalie’s success is attributable more so to the team in front of him than his own natural ability. However, other times the opposite is true and the goaltender masks a team’s deficiencies
Think about it; it is hard enough to try and identify why goaltenders are successful at the NHL level, never mind determining how an 18 year old netminder playing in one of the many junior leagues will succeed five years down the road.Do teams need to draft goaltenders high in the draft to ensure future success?
Half the netminders who were considered their team’s starters in the NHL this season were drafted in rounds many consider to be a crapshoot. In fact, five goalies were drafted in the eighth and ninth rounds (rounds which do not even exist anymore). So, in effect, there are as many goalies starting in the NHL that were drafted in the first round, as there are goalies who (by today’s draft rules) wouldn’t have been drafted at all (a.k.a.—undrafted free agents).
Before stating that all the starting goaltenders drafted high and low are essentially of equal quality, we still have to analyze the actual netminding statistics.
These numbers are remarkably similar.
While statistics attempting to evaluate goaltenders seem to be behind those utilized for analyzing forwards or defensemen, some people consider save percentage to be the best indicator of goaltender performance, and in that regard, the goaltenders drafted lower had the edge. In terms of win/loss ratio, the numbers were almost identical with the lower drafted netminders holding a slight .01 edge over those drafted prior to the fourth round. That advantage seems to be equalized by a slight edge in goals against average for the higher drafted netminders.
Overall, the numbers above probably couldn’t be more similar if we tried. Leading me to believe that there are many goaltending bargains out there, you just have to look hard to find them. Considering the cost, or lack thereof, of making such a selection, I wouldn’t be surprised to see teams look for diamonds in the rough more often than drafting a goaltender with a first round selection.
DO EARLY ROUND DRAFTED GOALIES OUTPERFORM LATER PICKS
(May 2009)
Last week, I focused my attention on the ratio of starting NHL netminders that were selected early in the NHL Entry Draft, late in the draft or were not drafted at all. While the findings were a bit surprising, being that half the NHL’s starting netminders from this past season were drafted in the fourth round or below, I wanted to take the study one step further and
evaluate whether drafting a goalie in the higher rounds was a better predictor of the netminder’s chance of making the NHL.
Almost everyone knows that the draft is somewhat of a crapshoot. For all the work teams and scouts put into projecting the future production of teenagers, there is an element of luck involved as well. This element of luck may be even more apparent when it comes to goaltenders. As the above statistics indicate, only 20% of goaltenders drafted (in the first seven rounds) over the eleven draft years of 1991-2001 have played 100+ games in the NHL. While these are the overall numbers, is there greater likelihood of success for drafting goaltenders later in the draft as opposed to earlier?
Not surprisingly, drafting a goaltender higher in the draft makes it more likely that the player will play at least 100 games in the NHL. That said, the percentage of netminders (15%) who have become at least serviceable NHL netminders after the third round is not insignificant.
On top of that, nine more netminders selected in rounds after the seventh (which do not exist anymore) have played in over 100 NHL games. So if you take into account the fact that it cost nothing, except for money, to sign an undrafted netminder, then over the course of the eleven years between 1991 through 2001, 22% (135/30) goalies drafted after the third round have played in at least 100 NHL games.
Maybe the important point we have to be aware of is the fact that there are only 60 goaltenders (30 starters and 30 backups) in the NHL on a regular basis. So,
one has to wonder whether teams should be taking a chance on a goaltender so early when there are twelve active forward spots to fill and six defense spots.
Overall, the numbers appear to affirm the idea that drafting a netminder high in the draft may not be worth a team’s while, especially when better forward options are available.
With the way goalies tend to develop at different rates and the difficultly with projecting which ones will succeed and which ones will have more trouble, NHL teams are probably better off drafting forwards/defensemen early in the draft.
WHAT ROUND SHOULD GOALIES BE DRAFTED
I’m not a believer in drafting goalies in the first round.
Only eight of the twenty-four goaltenders selected in the first round have managed to start at least forty NHL games in any one season. And that ratio looks worse when you take out all of the goalies selected in the top five picks. Those five top five picks have done well which is pretty darn important considering they’re, you know, top five picks
How does this 6th-30th segment of the draft compare to the later rounds?
Taking all goalies drafted in rows three and four, the success rate is at 21.7% over these nine years. From rounds three to nine, the success rate is at 10.1% which means you would need to make nine picks from the 3rd round to the 9th round (well, 7th round now) in order to have the same odds of picking one “success” as just one pick in the first two rounds.
I think the “lots-late” approach is better. For now, I’ll outline two reasons very briefly. The first is that the rate of success for quality forwards and defenders in the early rounds of the draft is much better than goalies (this is what needs to be established with data and will be the subject of the forthcoming article). The second is that all of these successes aren’t created equal.
These are the guys worth drafting, players that are hard to acquire via free agency cheaply and who will contribute many wins at low cost during the early part of their careers.
OPPORTUNITY COST
(July 2011)
In the 5-year period from 1997-2001, 14 goalies were drafted in the first round. Apparently this number satisfied some type of equilibrium, because it stayed exactly the same from 2002-2006. Then suddenly things changed. In 2007, not a single goalie was taken in the first round – the first time this had occurred since 1992. Then it happened again in 2009, and again this past year. Collectively, only 4 goalies were drafted in the first round between 2007-2011. Why?
It turns out that this trend coincides fairly directly with the rise of free agent goalie signings out of Europe.
There’s one very common attribute that most of these European imports share: advanced age. Backstrom was 28 when first he came to the NHL;
In a league where we expect many players to jump into the league in their early 20’s, most goalies are barely getting their toes wet till well into their mid 20’s.
The average NHL goalie is 29 years of age. That means that a goalie drafted today likely won’t be ready to play for 11 years, or until the year 2022.
Furthermore, there’s very little assurance that a goalie who’s selected in the 1st round pick will be better than his draft lagging peers.
Based on all this evidence, it’s no wonder that NHL General Managers aren’t using their prized early picks to select goaltenders.
If you can potentially acquire an excellent goaltender in the 5th round or later, but can only get a great forward in the first round of the draft, then you’ll learn quickly that
forwards are of far greater value at the draft since goaltenders can be easily acquired with later (historically less valuable) picks.
In the world of finance, they call this ‘opportunity cost’ – i.e, if you pay $10 for something, that’s $10 you don’t have to spend somewhere else. Similarly,
if you use a first round pick on a goalie, that’s a first round pick you can’t use on a forward.
YOU CANT DRAFT GOALIES AND NEITHER CAN ANYONE ELSE
(March 2012)
Every time I see a team spend a first round draft pick on a goaltender, I think the same thing: what a terrible waste of a precious commodity. The odds are really, really good that if you’re a premiere scorer at the NHL level, scouts saw you coming at a young age. When it comes to goalies, however, professional scouts do a terrible job of identifying talent.
That’s a ton of the league’s top goaltending talent, and all of them were either grossly underrated or missed entirely in their respective draft years
Teams can get elite goaltending talent from that older guy nobody has ever heard of playing Europe, or from that random pick they made in the fifth round. The reason for this is because scouts are much, much worse at identifying the best goalies in a given age group than they are at identifying the best forwards.
The key problems involved – including the scarcity of elite, non-first round forwards and the abundance of elite. Non-first round goalies.
Drafting a goalie early is no guarantee that he’ll be any good; NHL scouts have proven to be rather poor at long-term projection of goalies relative to other positions.
The solution is this: never waste a first-round pick on a goalie. If possible, never waste a top-100 pick on a goalie – because that’s the only place where teams can reliably get good forwards.
Instead, draft goalies late – take a guy like Tyler Bunz or Olivier Roy after the 100th overall pick. Take one every year just to keep a bunch of these long-shots in the system, then watch and wait; if they turn out, great, if they don’t, no loss. Then augment those draft picks with older, undrafted players – sure, they’ll probably turn out to be Jonas Gustavsson instead of Niklas Backstrom, but there’s no way of knowing and the cost is awfully low.
Regardless, the chances of hitting the jackpot aren’t much worse with a late pick or an undrafted free agent signing than they would be with an early selection.
WHAT’S THE BEST ROUND TO DRAFT A GOALIE
(May 2012)
While everyone agrees that having a few goaltenders in a stable of prospects is a smart move, there’s a significant debate regarding when the best time to draft a goaltender.
In short, there’s really no best time.
Among the league’s best goalies, it doesn’t seem to matter when they’re drafted.
The difficulty is the variability in finding an elite goaltender in the masses of teenagers from around the world.
If the draft as a whole is a crap-shoot, selecting a goalie can be even moreso,
and that’s ignoring the numerous developmental hurdles that goalies have to clear that other players generally aren’t faced with.
The variability in finding and drafting goalies is best illustrated in two separate phenomenon: goalies drafted early who bombed, and goalies drafted late that turned out to be very good.
This variability in outcomes for goaltenders has led some clubs to become risk-averse, particularly in early rounds.
Given the value of early-round draft picks – many of whom would be expected to help out at the NHL level eventually – this make sense: clubs want to hedge their bets and when almost every team has an early-round flop, it makes them less likely to draft a goalie early.
However, while almost every team has a horror story about a goaltender flopping, some clubs also have a wonderous story of a late-round pick turning into a steady NHL contributor.
These late-round success stories, much like knowing a lottery winner, provide faint hope for teams considering using a later pick on a netminder. If they don’t pan out, wasting a sixth round choice on a goalie is much easier to swallow than using up a second or third round choice.
In summation: drafting is hard and drafting goaltenders doubly so. A lot of things can (and do) go wrong in goaltender development and because of those factors, choosing a goalie very early in the draft can be a recipe for future disappointment. That said, teams need goalies and will always try to draft some, regardless of these possibilities. Minimizing risk leads teams to draft goalies late, but the chance of missing out on a gem may force teams to draft goaltenders in the mid-rounds. While not ideal, it’s probably the best middle-ground approach for the teams involved.
DRAFTING A GOALIE IN THE FIRST ROUND
(May 2013)
How wise is it to select a goaltender inside the first twenty picks of an NHL draft?
If the goaltender is the best player available, why not take him? .
Clearly, survey says Fucale goes quickly in the draft. Just how quickly it happens depends on, obviously, how the chips fall. Does he go in the top ten? Probably not. Top fifteen? Unlikely. But
that fifteenth overall slot is where things will get interesting.
At that point in the draft, wingers aren’t the true strength. And so, Fucale could be an option.
In short: Ryan Pike looked at the best round to pick a goaltender, and concluded that “in short, there’s really no best time.”
WHEN IS THE BEST ROUND TO DRAFT A GOALIE
(June 2013)
Drafting and scouting goaltenders are two of the most difficult challenges for NHL teams.
It's the most important position on the ice and one that greatly impacts the chances that a franchise has of winning the Stanley Cup. This is why taking goaltenders in the first round may seem like a good idea, but when you look at recent NHL history, it’s best to wait a little longer before selecting a player at this position.
For teams in a rebuilding phase, drafting a goaltender high in the first round, especially with a lottery pick, is oftentimes a very risky move.
Since most teams these days are less willing to go through several years of finishing at the bottom of the standings, stockpiling top picks and rebuilding properly, taking a goaltender in the top 10 of the draft rarely happens.
Too many teams try to rebuild on the fly and don’t have the patience to draft an 18- or 19-year-old goalie who needs three, four or even five years of development
at the junior and minor league levels before being ready to make a strong impact in the NHL.
Many of the goalies drafted in the later rounds become quality NHL players
Since goalies take longer than skaters to reach their full potential, teams make the mistake of giving up on them too early.
This was the case with Rask, who was traded to Boston in 2006 when the Leafs decided to keep goalie prospect Justin Pogge instead.
If teams are going to take a goalie in the first round, they must be willing to wait long enough for that player to develop or it will likely become a wasted pick.
It takes goalies longer to develop into an elite level, which is why so many teams don’t exercise the patience required to ensure they reach their potential.
Most lottery teams have opted to go the route of drafting a forward or a defenseman who will contribute at the NHL level quicker and sell tickets. When you look at the impressive number of franchise cornerstone forwards and defensemen selected in the top 10 of the first round since 2000, it’s hard to argue with teams’ deciding to stay away from goalies.
When a first-round skater doesn’t perform as expected, what could have been a top-six forward or top-four defenseman becomes a bottom-six forward or a depth defenseman, and teams need these players more than ever in the cap era when building depth requires multiple players with inexpensive contracts.
Skaters still have value if they don’t reach their potential, but the same cannot be said of goaltenders who fail to live up to the hype.
The best time to pick a goaltender is after the first round. Given the success of goalies being drafted in the middle and later rounds over the last 15 years, in addition to the time it takes for them to develop fully, it’s wise to use top 30 picks on forwards and defensemen who will contribute sooner and give a franchise marketing oopportunities
AGE AT DRAFT
We’ve got a few questions here:
· Is it better to draft goalies later than at age 18?
· Is there an ideal age to draft goalies?
· Who gets drafted later?
Almost 49% of drafted goaltenders have been 18, and the number of goalies drafted declines with age.
Nineteen and 20 year olds enter the NHL at the same rate and reach games-played benchmarks at the same rate as 18 year olds.
Goaltenders drafted at 20 become NHL regulars at about the same rate as younger players, but on the whole tend to play fewer games than those drafted at 18 or 19.
First round players have a similar success rate regardless of age. After that, however, nineteen year olds do a bit better than eighteen year olds up to the seventh round. Twenty year olds are all over the map.
None of this is true, however, of overage draftees, whose success outstrips all the rest of those drafted.
These are players who were not playing in North America at age 18, 19, or 20. They are exclusively Europeans (and one Japanese), and to some extent showcase what happens when players are left to mature before being drafted. Two thirds of them have made the NHL for at least one game, and 4 of 18 players have more than 200 games. In other words,
the success rate for players drafted at age 21 or older is as great as the failure rate for players drafted earlier.
The overall question still stands, however. Is 18, 19, or 20 too young to expect goaltenders to be ready for the draft? If it’s true that (a) goaltenders take longer to develop than other players and (b) goaltending is so greatly influenced by randomness that our ability to project talent is worse than for any other position, then it follows that
bringing goaltenders into the NHL system at a later age might be better for both goalies and teams alike. And the success of overage draftees could be pointing in that direction
DON’T COUNT ON ADDING A STARTER AT THE DRAFT
(Jan 2014)
Goalies are among the most difficult players to project into the future and draft history shows it.
You’re just as likely to pick up an eventual starting goalie in a late round or as an undrafted free agent as you are anywhere in Round 1.
No first-round goalie is a surefire NHLer and while 10 of the NHL’s 30 starters were drafted in the first round, eight more were picked in the now-defunct eighth and ninth rounds or never picked at all. Four goalies were picked in the second round and four in the third, while the rest went in rounds 5 through 7.
Ultimately, there are many roads to finding a goaltender and the draft isn’t necessarily the best.
GOALIES, DECISION MAKING, AND HOCKEY
I believe that the NHL is really, really good super-concentrated collection of the very best hockey talent on the planet. As a result, you have to be an elite performer in your pre-NHL days to even make the league, and this elite performance is reflected one way or another on the scoresheet. As this applies to goalies, we should expect the guys who make the NHL as regulars to stop pucks at an elite level in junior.
Would be remiss if I didn’t hammer this point home at least once in this article:
CHL success is no guarantee of NHL success.
Even if a given goalie was an elite performer in junior, there was no guarantee that they’d make the NHL as even guys who posted career save percentages in the 84th percentile or above (more than 1 standard deviation above the mean) only had about a 20% chance of becoming an NHL’er.
But here’s the takeaway from that: a draft pick is a bet. When drafting a player, you’re betting that the player you pick will outperform any other player you have the opportunity to spend that pick on. A goalie who has an elite save percentage such as Tristan Jarry or Eric Comrie is historically 5-6 times more likely to develop into an NHL player than a goalie who performs similarly to Jake Paterson or Zach Fucale, so using an early draft pick on a goalie with mediocre numbers is generally a terrible, terrible bet.
Given that only ~5% of CHL goalies turn into NHL’ers and there are roughly 60-70 legitimate average or better goalies currently in the CHL, there are probably only 3 or 4 future NHL goalies in the entire CHL right now.
Perhaps the most damning thing about goaltending is that scouts and “hockey people” who claim to be experts on goaltending and forecasting performance are simply completely wrong the vast majority of the time.
Goalies are all over the map. There’s no real relationship between what their value turns out to be and what scouts think of them:
Add to this the fact that 84% of all goalies drafted out of the CHL between 1995 and 2009 failed to become NHL regulars, and you start to get the sense that scouts are, at best, really bad at judging goaltender talent level.
Odds are that any given goalie in the CHL will not make it to the NHL no matter who they are. That’s not a slight against any goalie, that’s just the hard truth. The NHL is the absolute best league in the world, getting in is ultra competitive and really, really difficult. The vast majority of prospects out of the CHL fail to get in, and those that do have tended to be elite performers when they were in junior.
DRAFTING EUROPEAN GOALIES IN LATER ROUNDS
No goalie who played their draft eligible season in the CHL (OHL, WHL, QMJHL) between 1997 and 2006 and was drafted in the later rounds of the draft has ever managed to play 100 NHL games.
Why is this the case? I really don’t know. Maybe all of the CHL prospects are so highly scouted and scrutinized it’s harder to steal a future contributor in the later rounds.
If I am running a draft table however, I am definitely leaning towards taking a European goalie with those late round picks.
DON’T DRAFT A GOALIE UNTIL THE THIRD ROUND
(June 2014)
Drafting goaltenders is always a risky proposition in the first round, and there are enough quality position players in the Draft pool to make it tough to justify taking a goalie in that spot as the best available player.
This is the conundrum of goaltender drafting, and the reason why most NHL teams nowadays are reluctant to take a goalie in the first round.
Their development cycle often takes the longest before the player is even NHL-ready, let alone ready to become a full-time starter. It is not all uncommon for goaltenders who were not considered standouts in their Draft classes to catch and surpass the more highly touted names by the time they reach their mid-20s.
It takes so long for most draft-eligible goaltenders to be ready for the NHL that, by the time they are finished “cooking”, there’s no telling what a team might actually have in that player. Most NHL scouts will tell you that they consider the projection of teenage goalies to involve the most guesswork of any pre-Draft preparation they do.
If you can potentially acquire an excellent goaltender in the 5th round or later, but can only get a great forward in the first round of the draft, then you’ll learn quickly that forwards are of far greater value at the draft since goaltenders can be easily acquired with later (historically less valuable) picks.
In the world of finance, they call this ‘opportunity cost’ – i.e, if you pay $10 for something, that’s $10 you don’t have to spend somewhere else. Similarly, if you use a first round pick on a goalie, that’s a first round pick you can’t use on a forward.
For this reason, I am usually leery of teams using first-round picks on goaltender. There are exceptions, of course, but the risk of subsequent buyers’ remorse is just too high in most cases to justify going with a goalie over a position player in Round One.
On the other hand, I am very much a believer in taking a goalie at some point in most every Draft. An NHL team may be set in goal for right now. But by the time the drafted goal is done developing, who knows?
Elite forwards are much harder to come by in either trades, free agency, or the later rounds. Drafting a goaltender in the first three rounds of the draft may be shortchanging yourself, especially when there are elite level goaltenders to be found through other methods.
COST OF TAKING GOALIES EARLY
(Aug 2014)
Acquiring Defensemen
Blueliners can be acquired either later in the draft, or through other means, much easier than forwards because the projection of a defenseman is a much more difficult.
Acquiring Goaltenders
It’s a total crapshoot. Even though the majority of the goaltenders (6 out of 10, 60%) were initially drafted in the first round, the value of young goaltenders sways and is constantly changing. They can be acquired rather easily when they are at low value, and then developed further until they are ready to move into an NHL role. 80% of the goaltenders were acquired by trades.
The opportunity cost of drafting a goaltender or a defenseman over drafting a forward in the earlier rounds is simply not worth it. Elite forwards are much harder to come by in either trades, free agency, or the later rounds.
Drafting a goaltender or a defenseman in the first three rounds of the draft may be shortchanging yourself, especially when there are elite level d-men and goaltenders to be found through other methods.
IT'S STILL OK TO DRAFT GOALIES
It's pretty clear that most drafted goalies don’t really become NHL goalies. Let’s be generous and say that, given enough time for things to shake out, 40% of goaltenders drafted by NHL teams will have at least one NHL game.
It’s got to be hard for anyone to look at that and consider drafting goaltenders a high-value enterprise for any team.
Specialization only makes sense if NHL teams are much, much better at identifying and developing forward talent than at identifying and developing goalie talent. However, they’re not. Drafting for forwards actually has similar rates of failure as drafting for goalies
So, basically, only about 15% of forwards drafted become even full-time NHL players in the 5 to 7 years after their draft (the bar here is 28 to 40 games played per year for 7 or 5 years, respectively). Three-quarters—77%--of drafted forwards don’t even qualify as marginal NHL players (100 GP in 5+ years). I have a hard time considering that a huge success rate, but it is better than defensemen by a little and goalies by a lot..
I fully agree with those who argue against drafting goalies high. Only in exceptional cases (such as Andrei Vasilevskiy) does it make sense to draft a goalie before the late second round at the earliest. And don't be hesitant to explore older goalies who have passed draft age.
However, the gap between goalie drafting and forward drafting isn't nearly as stark as it's been made out to be. It's much more worthwhile to make drafting and development at all positions better than to attempt to specialize in elite forwards to the exclusion of other positions.
TO DRAFT OR NOT TO DRAFT
https://hockey-graphs.com/2014/09/04/to-draft-or-not-to-draft-goalies-not-really-the-right-question/
goalies are simply not worth drafting in the early rounds of the draft,
THE TROUBLE WITH DRAFTING GOALIES
· Excess goalies in a system are basically useless.
· Working your way up through a system as a goalie is a long, difficult, pressure-filled process.
· There are way more goalies than there are roster spots for goalies.
there’s a median class of goaltenders that are good enough to be better than their backups, but virtually interchangeable with each other.
a new goalie has to be a significant improvement above the current guy to garner any interest at all.
Only eight of the top 30 (27%) SV% guys were picked in the first round. Thirteen of the 30, however, were chosen in the fifth round or below (43%).
· Having lots of goalies in a system is rather pointless since goaltending isn’t additive like scoring.
· A goalie’s development path is often difficult and long.
· Goalie supply far outweighs demand.
· Outside of the best in the biz, goalies have very little value as trade assets. Goalie prospects are worth even less by several orders of magnitude.
· It is very difficult to predict a goalie prospect’s future success. Current SV% leaders were liberally sprinkled throughout the draft.
Drafting goalies is next to pointless. Trading even a first round pick for, say, a decent NHL goaltender whenever you need one (which isn’t that often) seems to make WAY more sense than drafting a goalie prospect with the same pick.
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