Interested to see if they keep trading down in the draft.
The Travis Dermott/Jeremy Bracco/Martins Dzierkals 3 for 1 with Philadelphia trade seemed like an intelligent play at the time, but the quantity we got back for who Philadelphia targeted (Travis Konecny) and the guy we left on the board, Sebastian Aho, it feels like they outwitted themselves into a downgrade. Feels like the team trading up did their homework and the Leafs played the percentages.
The Bokk pick for Sandin and SDA seems like a good bet, on the other hand.
Not sure it necessarily has anything to do with homework. If the Leafs were playing the percentages, they would still need to do their homework on those players... At least as much, if not more, than Philly or Columbus.
There just is a lot more to a draft pick than just saying it was a good pick or a bad pick. When you make a draft pick, you are essentially drafting a relatively unknown, raw resource that you need to develop and grow, and each have essentially different "splits" when it comes to their risk-reward proposition.
Say you were to simplify this split as follows: High end player/Solid NHLer/Total Bust.
Player A may have a split like 10/15/75, Player B may have a split like 15/5/80, and Player C may have a split like 5/30/65. Now assume this is an all-encompassing number and they all have the same sort of impact if they do, in fact, become a high end player or solid NHLer (obviously this is an oversimplification, and accurately determining these splits or an equivalent method is how a team will be a better "drafting" team than another)...
Which guy would you take? It obviously depends on your appetite (once again a key factor in determining your ability in drafting), and based on that, there are stoichastic algorithms which will objectively tell you which player to take as a result. You could say Player B is the best because he has the best chance of being a high end player. You could say Player C because he has the best chance of becoming an NHLer at all. You could say Player A because he has a good mix of both. Any works depending on your appetite and other factors, like your development team's ability. Now let's say I introduced Player D with a split of 5/5/90. You would probably say Player D is a terrible pick because he has the worst overall chance of becoming an NHLer and the worst chance of becoming a high end player too. The algorithm, no matter your appetite, would likely tell you the same thing.
Now let's say it is 10 years down the road and Player D turns out to be a better player than all of A,B and C (which means they are either busts or only solid players). Statistically, there is only a 3.63% chance of that happening according to the above splits (0.05*0.9*0.85*0.95 ~= 0.0363375 or 3.63%, and logically this number does make sense), but still a chance nonetheless. Would you say that you were a poor drafting team by taking A,B or C over D. Could be that you had an inaccurate evaluation of the players, which comes down to scouting and ultimately drafting, but it could also be nothing more than poor development or dumb luck that worked against you.
You can do everything you can to put yourself in the best position possible, and statistically speaking, you are more likely to do well than not... However just ask yourself how often the Stanley Cup goes to the team which is the most well-positioned to win it? Far less often than you probably would hope if you were one of those teams.
