I just found this article about defenders (especially defensive defenders) taken early in the draft and their success story:
http://thats-offside.blogspot.ca/201...and-draft.html
Very interesting stuff and does indeed show a very clear result (with some outliers of course).
I will sum it up in short:
The writer took a look into every CHL defender drafted in the first three round between 1998 and 2008. The results are that the likelyhood to become an NHL regular (defintion: played 40% or more of the possible games since your draft day) is ~1 to 10 if the player has scored under a 0.6PPG rate in his draft season (CHL ONLY!!). The only guys to make it out of that group seem to be guys that have great skating, but for whatever reason just didn't scored in their draft year. All of them had huge breakout season within their junior career. To name them: Weber, Myers, Coburn, Vlasic, Letang, Staal, Phaneuf and Travis Hamonic.
Guys that are on their way to join that list are zadorov and Morin. Both also known for their great skating (especially for their size).
So the conclusion for me is, never draft a slow skating defender with less then 0.6PPG in their draft year out of the CHL. Taking a look into this years draft, we should NOT draft the following guys early:
Brandon Carlo
Matt Spencer
Simon Bourque (is right around 0.6PPG)
Jason Bell
Guillaume Brisbois
Austin Strand
Brendan Guhle
Those are the guys out of the draftside top90 that do play under 0.6 PPG in the CHL, though none of them is really known to be a bad skater. This might be due to the modern hockey having much more mobile defenders, or it is just a lucky year. Anyway even with most of them being good skaters and non ranked in the first round, chances are quit high that all will. You can obvious luck out on one of them just like you can on most prospects, but after that article I would rather search my luck somewhere else.
But keep in mind that we are talking here about NHL regulars and not about them never even sniffing the NHL.
Talking about our very own guys, it makes Blujus primed to become a bottom pairing guy, that most likely will not last long. Koekkeok is obviously on the right side of this theory and we haven't drafted any other CHL defenders early.