I had Sieg behind all those players except Neuvirth as the 8th best player since Zednik. If you’ve got him 9th that’s still very high from an enormous sample size of guys that never made it to the NHL because non 1st round pick aren’t worth much.
There's also players like Djoos (who I still think is better than Siegenthaler), Pettinger, Bulis, Sanford, Carrick, Bowey, and Lepisto on the same tier as Siege. It's easy to rate him higher than some of those guys using the power of hindsight on them and an optimistic view for Siegenthaler's future, but all of these players had similar promise at the same stage of their career to Siege and grabbed a depth NHL roster spot somewhere (and guys like Sanford, Carrick, Bowey, and Djoos still have one). Similarly, there's not really an argument for Siege ahead of Neuvirth at this juncture, considering Neuvirth carved himself out a career as a 1B while Siege is barely still starting his NHL journey.
Most of the draft pick success-rate analysis isn't about "never making the NHL," but rather who becomes a "career player." The definition of career player may vary, but it's typically set at some games played threshold. A decent chunk of 2nd rounders do actually make the NHL for 1+ games, it just rapidly declines as you increase that games played threshold. For reference, 22 of the 31 players picked in the 2015 2nd round have made an NHL appearance (and 10 of them have played more games than Siege). At 90 NHL GP, Siege has slightly beaten the odds of his pick (
44% of 2nd round selections from 2000-2009 played 50 NHL games), but hasn't reached the 200 NHL GP threshold that only about 25% of 2nd rounders achieve.
As for the value by round, the fact that the probability of
career NHLers is low in the later rounds is the rationale for why you
SHOULDN'T be trading up, not why you should. As the draft progresses, a shotgun approach to drafting and development is increasingly favored to targeting specific players, since it's a lot better to have multiple guys like 15% odds than one guy with 18% odds.
And, once again, let's not lose the forest for the trees here. I'm not arguing that Siegenthaler was a bad pick or that the Capitals shouldn't have picked him. If Siegenthaler was an isolated incident, it would be one thing. But he's not. He's only one example of the many instances the Capitals have traded up in the draft under GMBM. Especially when combined with all the picks they deal away to help the NHL club (which obviously makes sense during a contention window), it's a large contributing factor to why their prospect system is so poorly rated. This will likely be the fourth draft that GMBM has overseen in which the Capitals only make four selections.