Sunday, June 11, 2017

NHL-Draft 2017 / It's not Nolan vs Nico

There is a lot to read and listen about the upcoming draft and the expected duel between Canadian power-forward Nolan Patrick and Swiss skilled forward Nico Hischier. It’s a good story for the media and reminds us to the NHL-Draft 2010 when it was Taylor (Hall) vs Tyler (Seguin). I don’t read too much into it, it’s not so important who will be No.1 and No.2. Of course for the small hockey-country Switzerland it would be historical to have a 1st-overall pick but actually the same goes for a 2nd- or 3rd-overall.
Nico Hischier


Substantially the draft is much more than this media-hyped duel. The draft-battle doesn’t get usually decided in the first round. What really separates successful franchises from not so successful ones are their draftpicks after the 1st round. Before I spotlight some results in these rounds I put a personal comment to the Nolan vs Nico-matchup on the table: The New Jersey Devils have to take a decision in a not decidable situation. Even after evaluating all we have seen, read and analysed from various aspects: There is no clear edge in favour of Nolan or Nico, so it will be a “vanilla or chocolate”-decision. Still, the GM of the Devils has to decide and he will do so and so will I. I also don’t want to be a sheep and will present my decision if  I would be Ray Shero: I would go with Nico Hischier and believe me or not, this has nothing to do with my Swiss citizenship. It’s also for me extremely tight but personally I weigh in the injury-woes of Patrick maybe a bit more than others because I also believe that this was not just bad luck so far but also part of the whole Patrick-package. On the other hand we have Nico Hischier, not the biggest and not the strongest player but wow…he is so smart, skilled and impresses me with a great mix of a confident and still modest personality. Also his Combine-results make me confident about my choice. Finishing this off: This is not a personal guess who I believe the Devils will pick, this is just a personal choice if I would be the GM of the New Jersey Devils. In the tendency I still feel that a majority of North American NHL-guys fall slightly to Nolan Patrick but if Nico would go No.1 I’m not so sure whether the Flyers would pick Nolan Patrick as No.2. I’m a bit puzzled why the Flyers insisted on a special medical/physical checkup with Nolan Patrick but maybe I do read too much into it. But then again: Why the New Jersey Devils didn’t do the same?

But for now we leave it like that. The real draft-battle will start after the overall top 5. I feel that the opinions vary as maybe never before in terms of the ranking from 6th overall onwards. I expect a lot of discussions and a lot of times we will listen and read quotes from teams drafting in the 2nd or 3rd round as “we had him much higher and were very surprised that this player was still available”. The future success of the NHL-teams lies in the draft-decisions in later rounds and a big part of this is draft-luck. Drafting is not an exact science. But still, there are a lot things you can do better than others and exactly this is what all scouting-teams are trying to do. Tons of meetings will be held with going through all the rankings, the eventualities, anticipated scenarios, “what if?”. Drafting best players available or according to the need?

Predicting who will do good at the draft table and who won’t is not really possible. There were too many changes in the head-offices and in the scouting-departments from 2007 to 2013. Analysing the draft-success from these years there is no dominating franchise in this discipline. Not even one team did do always good. There are various possibilities judging draft-success, I will add one more. What I did analyse a bit was how many impact players the team drafted in the rounds 2-7 in the years 2007 – 2013. Why is that? Analysing the last 10 years it’s obvious that if teams have an early 1st-round-pick they usually succeed. It’s quite clear that top 5 overall picks developped into more or less impact players and this didn’t depend on the franchise (of course there are exceptions to the rule). There is also a significant smaller chance to get an impact player if you pick late in the first round and also this didn’t depend much on the franchise. So, that’s why I tried to figure out what franchise did find more impact-players than others in later rounds. I also stopped after the 2013-draft because I think it would be not fair, to already judge the results from the 2014, 2015 and 2016 draft, it’s too early.

Who is the best player in this decade who was drafted in a late round? Jamie Benn, DAL, he was a 5th-rounder back in 2007! 
Jamie Benn

Dallas picked very well in 2010 when they grabbed John Klingberg, again in the 5th round! Other than that Nashville did do well in 2008 (Roman Josi 2nd round), 2009 Mattias Ekholm and Craig Smith both in the 4th  round. Montreal picked P.K. Subban 2007 in the 2nd round and Arturi Lehkonen 2013 also in the 2nd. The Tampa Bay Lightning didn’t have too much to offer in this category from 2007-2010 but came up big 2011 and 2012 with players like Nikita Kucherov (2nd round) plus 7th-rounders! Ondrej Palat and Nikita Gusev (ok, the jury on Gusev is still out NHL-wise but I believe he will be really good). Ottawa is proud of their Mike Hoffman-pick in the 5th round 2009 and 2010 Mark Stone in the 6th. Pittsburgh might be quite happy with 2013 pick Jake Guentzel and undrafted acquisition Conor Sheary, also in 2013. Calgary drafted T.J. Brodie 2008 in the 4th round and Johnny Gaudreau 2011 also in the 4th round. San Jose had decent picks back in 2008 (Tommy Wingels, 6th round and Jason Demers, 7th round) plus Nick Bonino in the 6th round 2007. I definitely miss now the one or the other franchise and/or players with similar impacts in this time-frame but believe me: Most franchises have between 1 to 3 so called later-round-steals, there is not a superstar team with 5-10 and also not a scapegoat with just nothing. From this point of view the results are not really spectacular. 
P.K. Subban

Coming back to the first round: Of course the pressure to pick a great player in the early first-round is huge because the statistical probability tells us that most of the recent top5-picks became really good NHLers. What if the Flyers or the Devils pick Nolan Patrick and in 3-5 years they will find out that he became a so called “injury-prone-player”? Will then their medical staff still be the same? ;-) … so… in a way it’s nevertheless Nolan vs Nico, at least in the brains of Ray Shero and Ron Hextall.

Horgen, 11th June 2017 / Thomas Roost