KL*
Guest
Had some time recently so I compiled a spreadsheet to analyse and rank the drafting records of all 30 teams. Since it's usually recognised a draft cant be fully judged until 5 years later, I started with the 2001 draft and went back 15 years to 1987 which covered 3893 draft picks in total. I defined a NHL player as those who played 100+ games. This may seem low to some but look at it this way. What is a NHLer? I'd define it as someone who played in the NHL for at least a full season's worth of games? That player has acheived more than over 80% of all draft picks.
I also added in two more indicators of draft success - rankings based on draft record not including first rounders and the ability of teams to find the highest quality players. These arent included.. they are just for additional reference. My final rankings are determined on one score alone - the number of NHLers a team finds, divided by the number of picks it had. I wanted it to be a purely statistical ranking rather than bring in more and more factors. Its complicated enough!
We all know how our team drafts and now we can compare to other teams accurately and on an equal basis. We can also use this data to see if our team's drafting is improving - predict how many of your players from the drafts in 2002-6 will make at least 100 games in the NHL and work out the percentage score yourself.
I will be doing this in time honored HF fashion.. the bottom 10 teams will follow shortly. Monday - the middle 10, Tuesday the top 10 teams. There are quite a few surprises in each one! I will answer any questions you have, but will be away from a computer over the holiday period. Cheers
PS I do have the full breakdown of how every team scored in every round but not sure how to put it up here in a neat fashion. If you want to know your team's score in each round, post on here and I'll reply to it later.
This has been done a million times before. I actually did something similar as my Masters thesis.
Your calculations are completely irrelevant, as they do not take into consideration the fact that nobody really has the same GM for 15 years, and there isn't a GM in the league who was the GM for his team 15 years ago.
That, compounded by the incredible rates of turnover in scouting staffs over the years means that your numbers aren't the least bit relevant to today's NHL.
Then you have to take into account draft position, philosophy (some teams build/t through the draft, while others use/d the picks in trades), free agency (teams that signed more UFAs had fewer spots to be won), minor league affiliates, injuries (what if Mario Lemieux broke his neck during his first game? does that make the Lemieux pick a bust? It's Mario Freaking Lemieux...) and the Iron Curtain. Oh, and there's always the fact that 100 games played for a goalie is a lot more than 100 games played for a forward. There are starting goalies in the NHL who take more than two seasons to accrue 100 games played.
Any one of these factors would have rendered your calculations useless. All of them combined have made your work completely pointless.
It is an interesting thing to look at though. You don't have complete and accurate numbers though. Unless there's a new source that came up since I did mine (did it in 2003), you don't have a complete set of stats for all picks, and hockeydb has stats for some players transposed for others.