Draft Busts & Panning Out
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leave at once!
1999 was a weak draft all around. When Taylor Pyatt went #5th and Jamie Lundmark went 8th ovr, you know you're not going to have many good hits from that in hindsight. I can count the players that did do well from that draft on one hand. Sedin Brothers, Connolly, Havlat, Zetterberg, Miller. To a lesser extent Vrbata and Erat.
McRpro
Cont. without supporting.
A lot of it is based on how a player develops. Drafting 18 year olds isn't an exact science. Daigle definitely had the talent to be a top NHL player, like he was projected to be but he just didn't have the heart.
A player like Jessiman was projected to develop a scoring touch to go along with his mammoth frame. It hasn't happened.
It's all about how scouts project a player to turn out. And they aren't always right. Why did Zetterberg, Datsyuk, etc go so deep into the draft? Because they developed far more than any scout projected them to.
A player like Jessiman was projected to develop a scoring touch to go along with his mammoth frame. It hasn't happened.
It's all about how scouts project a player to turn out. And they aren't always right. Why did Zetterberg, Datsyuk, etc go so deep into the draft? Because they developed far more than any scout projected them to.
Mayor Bee
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Daigle had every offensive physical talent and dominated against his peers.
Stefan was regarded as a more "sure thing" than the Sedins or Pavel Brendl. If you don't remember it, there was a period from about 1994-98 where European players were coming over in their draft years and playing in the IHL rather than playing in the junior leagues over there. Radek Bonk (Las Vegas Thunder) did it, then Petr Sykora (Detroit Vipers), Sergei Samsonov (Detroit Vipers), and Robert Dome (Long Beach Ice Dogs). All ended up being first-rounders, and the decision to develop against professional North American players undoubtedly had some role in that.
Hugh Jessiman, to me, was a holdover from the late-90s drafts. There'd be some massive scrub drafted who did nothing his entire career to date, but the excuse was "You can't teach size". Guys like Jeff Zehr and Ty Jones and Scott Kelman were high picks based on this ridiculous logic. Jessiman was regarded as a project pick; if he panned out, then there's a massive power forward with good offense, and if not....
Alexander Svitov would have been a good NHL player if not for two things. He was basically grabbed off the tarmac when attempting to fly to Tampa for training camp and was promptly inducted into the Red Army. Rather than playing in North America or getting 40 games in Europe, he played in three games during a prime development year. The other factor is that, upon arriving, he discovered that John Tortorella hated him for some reason. He basically refused to play Svitov, then finally sent him down and refused to allow him back up. In Columbus, Svitov showed flashes of not only good offensive skill but also absolutely freakish strength. He did have a nasty tendency to take lazy penalties, but would have grown out of that.
Scissons I don't remember off the top of my head as far as the scouting reports, so I won't touch that.
vadim sharifijanov
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i've seen a lot of formerly highly touted offensive prospects who didn't make an impact right away and either got buried in the minorsor just fell off everybody's radar and rode the press box for a while. you think the guy was a bust and just disappeared off the face of the earth and then you turn around five years later and he's a great third liner on some other team. manny malhotra is probably the best recent example of this. but also to varying degrees ethan moreau, scott thornton, tyler wright, chad kilger, arguably daigle, gilbert brule... these are all skilled guys who put their speed or size or hockey sense to good use in a new role when they it became clear they couldn't hack it as scorers at the NHL level. and sometimes these guys even make it back to being top six players, like marty gelinas or dan cleary.
i always thought alex svitov was going re-emerge as one of those guys. he had all the tools to be a handzus or holik-type.
i always thought alex svitov was going re-emerge as one of those guys. he had all the tools to be a handzus or holik-type.
Mayor Bee
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Every player in bold played in Columbus at some point.
Just to clarify, Malhotra was never touted as an offensive prospect at all. He was projected as getting no higher than the third line, although that was regarded as a sure thing.
jkrx
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Rangers compared him to Adam Graves and it was Muckler who stated before Malhotras second NHL season that he would be nothing more than a 3rd liner. You are right that he was never touted a great offensive threat but he was compared to Brind'Amour at the draft meaning solid offense and very good defensive 2nd liner kind of guy.
tony d
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Yeah, the Jessiman pick has to haunt New York to this day. Imagine that team with Getzlaf, Perry or Parise all of whom were still there when the Rangers picked Jessiman
seventieslord
Student Of The Game
Hugh Jessiman is in danger of becoming a bust? that's news to me! I thought he already was a bust.
Shouldn't there be a great distinction drawn between busts like Jessiman who are drafted high and never play a game, and busts like Stefan and Daigle, who are useful NHL players for a decent length of time but just get more flak for being drafted 1st overall?
I don't know what is worse - blowing a 1st on a Daigle, or blowing a 9th on a jessiman.
My draft results project of a few years ago indicates Jessiman provided about 9% of his expected value as a 9th overall pick, and daigle provided about 32% the expected value. Same with Stefan.
Shouldn't there be a great distinction drawn between busts like Jessiman who are drafted high and never play a game, and busts like Stefan and Daigle, who are useful NHL players for a decent length of time but just get more flak for being drafted 1st overall?
I don't know what is worse - blowing a 1st on a Daigle, or blowing a 9th on a jessiman.
My draft results project of a few years ago indicates Jessiman provided about 9% of his expected value as a 9th overall pick, and daigle provided about 32% the expected value. Same with Stefan.
TheDevilMadeMe
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Haha, seriously. That's what I thought when I read the OP. It's been seven years! I think it's safe to call him a bust by now.
Yeah, good point. Both are pretty (equally?) bad.
How did you define "expected value?"
ColdSteel2
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I recall the Sedins being the biggest sure thing of that draft. They got about the same attention as Tavares and everybody was waiting for their arrival in the NHL as far as 3-4 years before they were drafted. I remember the only question about their success in the NHL was how they would play apart from each other.
vadim sharifijanov
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yeah, come to think about it, the jackets did reclaim a lot of guys' careers, though i guess moreau and brule don't count here. the canucks tried to do the same in the first half of the last decade, but most of those guys just kept flopping: warriner, fedor fedorov, convery, berehowsky, nolan baumgartner, and my man vadim sharifijanov. curious what it was about columbus (coaching staff? developmental staff?) that managed to bring these guys back from the dead and turn them into contributors.
my recollection is from when the canucks insisted on malhotra coming the other way when they were trading bure, so i can't vouch for his draft projections. but people on the sports shows were comparing malhotra to trevor linden (so graves is not so far off if you discount what linden meant to vancouver)-- not a superstar, but also not a third liner.
seventieslord
Student Of The Game
This was an extensive and exhaustive project I did three years ago, analyzing the 1968-2001 drafts and assigning an hf rating to drafted players based on how their careers went. This was done before I had participated in any ATDs so undoubtedly with today's knowledge I would probably do a much better job.
I assigned player "values" intutitively to the hf ratings, on an exponential scale where a 1 (a player who never made it and never really got close) was worth a 1, and a 10 (only assigned to Lemieux) was worth 100. A 9 (a basic franchise player like Pronger) was worth exactly half that, and an 8 (a good top-pairing guy like Kenny Jonsson) was worth just over half that, 26. And so on.
I manipulated the ratings and constantly tweaked the pecking order of players for months until I felt I had it right. I made sure that 9s were much more rare than 8s, and 8s were more rare than 7s, and so on, right down to 1s being the most common type of draft choice. I also put more detail into the hf values by introducing 5.5, 6.5, 7.3, 7.5, 7.8, and every increment of 0.1 from 8.0 to 10.0 as options. (the closest anyone got to 10.0 was Roy's 9.6, still just a value of 75 compared to Lemieux's 100. FYI, Lafleur and Hasek were 9.5, Jagr, Bourque, Bossy, clarke and Messier were 9.4, Potvin, Yzerman, Trottier and Lidstrom were 9.3 - looking down below the 9s, I definitely would have some work to do if I was to revisit this, for example, Kurri and Mogilny are both 8.9, but anyway...)
I then took the average player value at every draft slot for this 33-year period and it was amazing how nicely they all lined up:
2 | 24.64
3 | 20.75
4 | 19.38
5 | 18.42
6 | 15.47
7 | 13.92
8 | 16.67
9 | 13.21
10 | 10.89
11 | 13.21
12 | 10.75
13 | 11.78
14 | 12.5
15 | 12.05
16 | 9.1
17 | 10.58
Daigle was rated a 6.5. At his best he was an average 2nd liner, but his career was not a great length, and at his worst he was a belwo average top-6-or-bust type player. that's a value of 10.5 out of an expected 32.71, hence the percentage I quoted earlier.
Alexandr Svitov was compared, mostly, to Bobby Holik at the time of his draft. Except Svitov was tougher, meaner, and probably dirtier. I remember hating him so much when Russia played Canada at the World Junior's. He made an art out of embelishing penalties. I almost wish he'd panned out, just because he could've given Sean Avery a run as the most hated player in the NHL. He was interesting, if nothing else.
Alexandre Daigle seemed to be compared to Guy Lafleur from what I read. The hype was deserved, though. Compare his stats to that of other number 1 picks from the Q. He had 137 points in 53 games in his draft year, compared to Vincent Lecavalier's 115 in 58 5 years later. I get the feeling it was kind of a dead heat between him and Pronger, but the Sens (and everyone else) may have gotten caught up in the flashy, good looking, bilingual, Daigle. He was a showman.
People forget how maligned the Sedin's were right up until after the lockout. They took a lot of abuse by the Canadian media. They were always blamed for the Canucks lack of depth outside of the Morrison-Naslund-Bertuzzi line. Looking back, they were never really that bad.
Alexandre Daigle seemed to be compared to Guy Lafleur from what I read. The hype was deserved, though. Compare his stats to that of other number 1 picks from the Q. He had 137 points in 53 games in his draft year, compared to Vincent Lecavalier's 115 in 58 5 years later. I get the feeling it was kind of a dead heat between him and Pronger, but the Sens (and everyone else) may have gotten caught up in the flashy, good looking, bilingual, Daigle. He was a showman.
People forget how maligned the Sedin's were right up until after the lockout. They took a lot of abuse by the Canadian media. They were always blamed for the Canucks lack of depth outside of the Morrison-Naslund-Bertuzzi line. Looking back, they were never really that bad.
Mayor Bee
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I remember one of them (Daniel, I think) being talked about as falling to the bottom of the top-10 if not for the years of hype for the two as a collective package of sorts. In retrospect, I do have to wonder how much of the anti-Sedin talk in early 1999 simply had to do with seeing a guy for years and picking his game apart to an extent that no one else was experiencing.
But yeah, the idea of the two playing apart was a huge wild card.
The Brind'Amour comparison was based on faceoffs, defensive skill, and penalty killing ability. The nearly consensus thinking was that if the team that drafted him was expecting offense from Malhotra, they'd be sorely disappointed; if he developed some offensive skill, that would be an unexpected bonus.
jkrx
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Most reviews thought of him as an potential very good 2nd liner but as with many he took a shot way too early for a team that was in chaos and that stumped his growth. Did he get any regular 2nd line time in Columbus by the way? Would be intresting and see if he actually produced now with the confidence he obtained.
David Bruce Banner
Nude Cabdriver Ban
Scott Scissons had a shoulder injury that derailed his career.
At the time of his draft, he was looked on as a player who would develop into an above average (although, not superstar) offensive talent and also have the character and leadership abilities to one day be a team captain... kind of like Pat Flatley without all the nagging injuries.
The main downfall of draft day is that you can't predict injuries.
Stefan, like Nedved before him, was valued because he had already proven himself in North America... and unlike Nedved, had done so against "men". Even so, I don't really consider him a true 1st overall, as IIRC, he was only picked in that position due to a convoluted trade process where the Canucks got the 2nd and 3rd overall with the promise that Atlanta would NOT draft either Sedin with their pick.
At the time of his draft, he was looked on as a player who would develop into an above average (although, not superstar) offensive talent and also have the character and leadership abilities to one day be a team captain... kind of like Pat Flatley without all the nagging injuries.
The main downfall of draft day is that you can't predict injuries.
Stefan, like Nedved before him, was valued because he had already proven himself in North America... and unlike Nedved, had done so against "men". Even so, I don't really consider him a true 1st overall, as IIRC, he was only picked in that position due to a convoluted trade process where the Canucks got the 2nd and 3rd overall with the promise that Atlanta would NOT draft either Sedin with their pick.
2 other busts IMO was Brian Lawton and Pat Falloon. Lawton being a first over all pick and Falloon being a second overal pick right behind Eric Lindros.And the year that Falloon was drafted there was sooooooo many more players taken right after him that had amazing careers in the NHL....
Couple of things here, for a time and perhaps still to a certain degree the adage that "you can't teach size" allowed for some guys to go higher than they should have.
Also some guys just peak early while others keep getting better and better. Teams draft the 18 yr old on what he has done and project what he might become, not an exact science by any means.
Also some teams just plain draft and develop players better than other teams do.
A guy like Brian Lawton might have been the best talent in his draft but handling the pressure of being the savior on a really weak team is not for every player either.
I have noticed that in the 1st round at least that teams are getting better return for the players that they draft and it indicates that teams are getting better at projecting how prospects will pan out.
Hugh Jessiman is a bust, fits the big guy and stopped developing mold.
Also some guys just peak early while others keep getting better and better. Teams draft the 18 yr old on what he has done and project what he might become, not an exact science by any means.
Also some teams just plain draft and develop players better than other teams do.
A guy like Brian Lawton might have been the best talent in his draft but handling the pressure of being the savior on a really weak team is not for every player either.
I have noticed that in the 1st round at least that teams are getting better return for the players that they draft and it indicates that teams are getting better at projecting how prospects will pan out.
Hugh Jessiman is a bust, fits the big guy and stopped developing mold.
Rob
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They received extra attention because there were two of them and they refused to play apart.
Hockey Outsider
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seventieslord
Student Of The Game
I didn't, and I still consider the project to be one of my finest. Back then I wasn't fully ingrained in the "research and share" culture that I'm a big proponent of now. It seems silly now, but it was my baby and I was almost "protective" of it. I should start a thread on it when I get the time. It's interesting stuff.
