Best and Worst Drafts - 2018-2020

[Josh]

Looking over the past three drafts, six teams really stand out to me. Carolina, Los Angeles, the Rangers, and Detroit have added a ton of talent relative to the rest of the league. Especially Carolina, which is even more impressive considering they're the most competitive of the four. Boston and Columbus, on the other hand, have had extraordinarily dismal results. Columbus came out OK in 2018, but turned up nothing in 2019 and 2020.

Notable Selections:

Carolina
2018 - Andrei Svechnikov
2019 - Ryan Suzuki, Jamieson Rees, Patrik Puistola, Anttoni Honka
2020 - Seth Jarvis, Noel Gunler, Vasiliy Ponomarev, Alexander Nikishin, Zion Nybeck

LA
2018 - Rasmus Kupari, Akil Thomas, Aidan Dudas, Jacob Ingham
2019 - Alex Turcotte, Tobias Bjornfot, Arthur Kaliyev, Samuel Fagemo, Jordan Spence
2020 - Quinton Byfield, Helge Grans, Kasper Simontaival, Martin Chromiak

Rangers
2018 - Vitali Kravtsov, K'Andre Miller, Nils Lundkvist, Lauri Pajuniemi, Nico Gross
2019 - Kaapo Kakko, Matthew Robertson, Karl Henriksson, Zachary Jones
2020 - Alexis Lafrenière, Braden Schneider, Brett Berard

Detroit
2018 - Filip Zadina, Joseph Veleno, Jonatan Berggren, Jared McIsaac
2019 - Moritz Seider, Antti Tuomisto, Robert Mastrosimone, Albin Grewe, Albert Johansson
2020 - Lucas Raymond, Theodor Niederbach, William Wallinder

Now compare that to:

Boston
2018 - Jakub Lauko, Curtis Hall
2019 - John Beecher
2020 - Ø

Columbus
2018 - Liam Foudy, Kirill Marchenko, Marcus Karlberg, Trey Fix-Wolansky
2019 - Ø
2020 - Ø

[Josh]

What do you think matchesmalone? Would you agree that all the selections I noted for Carolina, LA, the Rangers, and Detroit have solid NHL potential? Did I miss any? Was there anyone selected by Boston or Columbus who I didn't list that you think has solid NHL potential?

[matchesmalone]

Hmmm. I'm really not very good at binary decisions like legit or non-legit prospect.

For Carolina, Jack Drury looks like he could easily be a solid bottom six forward. Strangely, Carolina doesn't seem to have an amateur scouting director. They do have a pretty good size staff, but more interestingly, they have a huge analytics staff, headed by Eric Tulsky.

L.A. has been absolutely blasting it out of the park lately. Props to Rob Blake, Mike Futa, Rob Vollman, Christian Ruuttu and Mark Yannetti. Doesn't hurt that they've got a gigantic scouting staff, with at least one scout based out of every major European hockey country, including Germany and Slovakia.

New York is of course another team with a huge scouting staff, headed by Jeff Gorton, Nikolai Bobrov and Gordie Clark.

Detroit, again, huge scouting staff, headed by Kris Draper and Hakan Andersson. Draper replaced Tyler Wright in 2019.

I know you didn't like the Chinakhov pick by Columbus, but he was the third highest p/g by a U19 in MHL last year, and so far this year his 9 in 16 is first by U20s in KHL. regardless where the pick was, I'd say he's looking like a pretty good prospect. Also Voronkov looks pretty decent from the 2019 draft - ice time is up around 15 mins per game this year from around 10 last year.

Columbus has a decent size scouting staff too. Interestingly, both of their head scouts are now European. In general, I don't think they've been drafting poorly in recent years, they've just lacked picks.

Boston also has a very large staff, but their DAS is formerly their director of hockey administration. Not sure what to make of that. Their scouting staff seems to lack leadership and direction, although I would have said the same thing about Carolina if not for the results.

Interesting that most of the teams with the most impressive recent draft records according to your analysis Josh, are big money teams with great big scouting staffs... except for Carolina, who seems to be moneyballing it. Will be interesting to look deeper into what exactly it is they're doing and what they're looking for.