rakii's draft thread

[LGR4GM]

What do the charts say about the defenders?

[rakish]

this year?  I'm still looking at old stuff, got a list?

[LGR4GM]

this year?  I'm still looking at old stuff, got a list?

Yea, I was thinking of the guys this year. Like the top 10 or so.

Chychrun, Juolevi, Bean, Sergachev, McAvoy, Fabbro, Girard and Stanley

[rakish]

It'll be a few days

[LGR4GM]

It'll be a few days

okay. Just because I feel like all of them are so close. I mean when I say I put Chychrun a hair above Sergachev I literally mean any good argument would probably sway me the other way.

[rakish]

Sorry Liger, I'm not getting to 2016 soon.  I want to do some

pipeline writing and some old draft writing, getting to the

new draft sort of ends valuation work, so I want to postpone it

some.

 

I'm taking a mulligan on the first Caggiula chart.
It needs not to be Sabres' focused, but NCAA focused, and

also the math has changed some, to Caggiula's benefit.
This time, as comparables, I used about 18 NCAA players
from relatively recent drafts.  Using
NCAA players allows me to eliminate a
variable and by using, more or less, all smalls,
everyone compares by size. The farthest away from
average size in this group would be Arnold, who is
heavy and Gaudreau, who is light.

I have a rule of thumb that, when prospects get to 1000 on my
valuing system, they are about ready for the NHL, but the
age at which they reach 1000 is critical in determining how
much they are going to score in the NHL. Caggiula (the black line) had a good year in 2015
at age 21, but Schwartz (the royal blue regression line)
had a better year at age 18, so I think of it as Jaden being 3 years ahead
in development.  The next regression line belongs to Gaudreau (steel blue),
whose 19th year was almost as good as Caggiula's 21st, and his
20th year better. Conacher (the light blue) has an interesting curve because he peaks at
age 19. At the other end, Matt Frattin had a comparable year to 2015 Caggiula, but did so at
age 22.

I clipped later seasons off the chart, mostly AHL and NHL, leaving
18 relatively random NCAA players in their best collegiate year.

Jaden Schwartz 1200 age 18
Johnny Gaudreau 1300 age 20
Cory Conacher 1200 age 19
JT Compher 1100 age 20
Matt Nieto 820 age 18
TJ Oshie 840 age 19
Jason Zucker 800 age 19
Bill Arnold 1090 age 21 (Played with Gaudreau in college)
Drake Caggiula 1025 age 21
Erik Haula 930 age 21
Travis Boyd 900 age 21 (A Capitals prospect)
Kenny Agostino 790 age 20 (A Calgary prospect)
Brian Flynn 900 age 21
Zach Hyman 1100 age 22 (In Toronto)
Matt Frattin 970 age 22
TJ Tynan 730 age 18
Max McCormick 640 age 21
Mark McMillian 600 age 22
 

So my view pretty much remains the same, offer contract? sure, why not?

Put him on the first line? No, don't think so.

[LGR4GM]

hmm this makes sense. I think Caggiula is decent but I wouldn't be prepared to put him in a top 6 role without seeing him at a higher level first. 

[rakish]

The Sabres Pipeline

The first chart contains everyone drafted in the last
three years.  The lines that go straight up and down
represent Eichel and Risto, the yellow line Reinhart.
You know those guys, so this isn't telling you anything.
It's messy and unreadable, so I'll trim off half or so.

The the next chart are only the good forwards, but without
Eichel and Reinhart. I made a list of how these guys compare
to their draft class in their latest year.

Eichel (3rd best forward from 2015 draft, if you are wondering, Sebastian Aho had
    a very good year, but it's likely my liiga value is too high, so this
    will likely move to second next time I look at my liiga value.)
Reinhart (6th from 2014)
Hudson Fasching (32nd from 2013)
Giorgio Estephan (27th from 2015)
Victor Oloffson (36th from 2013) He actually was drafted in 2014 as an overager, but
        I've decided to classify overagers with their draft class.
Gustav Possler (39th from 2013)
Justin Bailey (44th from 2013)
Sean Malone (56th from 2013)
William Carrier (58th from 2013)
Nick Baptiste (65th from 2013)

The defensemen chart.
Risto (2nd best defenseman from 2013 draft)
William Borgan (16th from 2015)
Jake McCabe (20th from from 2012)
Brendan Guhle (24th from 2015)
Brycen Martin (6th/52nd from 2015)
Casey Nelson (26th from 2012)
Anthony Florentino (40th from 2013)

The fourth chart is a small collection of power forwards, snipped
at age 20 for each player.  This shows Fasching comparable to other
power forwards at his age.  Right now
his regression line duplicates Wayne Simmonds, but Marcus Foligno
looked really good at age 20.

So removing the four who are fulltime NHL players,
for me, the pipeline looks like:
Fasching
Borgen - Making the World Juniors is an important metric.
Guhle
Estephan
Martin - Martin has had very good partial seasons mixed with poor
    partial seasons. I'm guessing last season can be explained
    by moving to a team with a better prospect, therefore he didn't get
    power play time.  It's interesting to me because most players are consistent,
    while Martin has been both very good, and not so good, scoring.
Oloffson
Possler - Possler had a big season a couple years ago, although it wasn't
    a lot of games.  
Bailey
Nelson - While Nelson's regression line lies below McCabe's, it doesn't
    necessarily mean he would score less.  The charts are
    contextualized for weight, or else all the best defensemen would
    be really small. It also benefits Nelson that I don't have his
    weight at age 17, as I do most everyone else.
 

[LGR4GM]

So what exactly are the X and Y axis describing?  

[rakish]

x is age

y is my valuation.  As I talked about in the Caggiula post, a forward who scores roughly 1000 is ready for the NHL, defensemen are trickier.

 

As to what 1000 means here, no forwards are close to that, Fasching could be a Sabre this year because he plays a position that doesn't require scoring, which is why you get a separate chart comparing Fasching to, as I perceive, similar players.  The smaller players, Oloffson, Possler, in my view, aren't close enough to 1000 yet.

[LGR4GM]

Okay, that makes sense. It is interesting to see how the prospects are coming along.I think that we as a community here sometimes forget how long it takes and how hard it is to for these guys to succeed.

[rakish]

The combined draft rating chart: part 1

 

I believe that if you can take the combined value of a team's draft history using my draft model, you can get a good idea of how the team will subsequently perform.  Am I sure about this? Well, I've only looked at a fistfull of teams, so we'll see as this rolls out.  So the draft rankings come from how they looked at the time.  For example Ottawa, with three first round picks in 2011, had a very good year from the model's point of view, but it hasn't really panned out.

 

We'll look at Buffalo first.  2005-2011 the chart shows roughly a combined 1200 average, which isn't good enough.  As the Sabres moved far enough forward in the draft, their combined total have been over 2000 the last three seasons, which seems to be the number a team needs to get to, so from this chart, and as you would expect, Buffalo looks good for a few years out.

 

Detroit: The model really liked Detroit's 2010 and 2011 draft, each over 2000, but subsequent drafts have not been quite good enough.  The model thought the 2015 draft was particularly bad, by Detroit's standard, an indication that the front office talent may be in Dallas.

 

Carolina hasn't broken 2000 in the 11 years of the chart, although 2015 was almost good.

 

Dallas had a fine 2012 draft, but they're not a team built around high draft picks.  The draft regression line is improving.

 

Ottawa: The model liked their 2015 draft, so not all hope is lost, but if you look at the draft regression line, Ottawa doesn't draft well enough.

 

So part 1 ends for me with 'eh, sort of interesting'

Edited May 10, 2016 by rakish

[rakish]

I ought to break out a year to give you an idea of where numbers are coming from, so here is the 2015 Sabres' draft:

 

JACK EICHEL: 1245

BRENDAN GUHLE: 285

WILLIAM BORGEN: 152

DEVANTE STEPHENS:73

GIORGIO ESTEPHAN: 268

IVAN CHUKAROV:26

 

So the Sabres 2015 combined is roughly 2000. The chart ends up being forwards biased, since they score more.  And for comparison, I'll show a bad year:

 

ZACK KASSIAN 383

BRAYDEN MCNABB 296

MARCUS FOLIGNO 165

MARK ADAMS 61

MAXIME LEGAULT 69

 

Roughly 1000

[LGR4GM]

That makes sense. Do the numbers get recalculated each year and take into account players like Victor Olofsson who plays in a league where scoring is much lower?

[rakish]

The SHL is difficult because there seems to be a pecking order for ice time based upon age or experience.  I talked to MODO a little about this a month ago.  So yeah, SHL players are given a higher rating for 1pt/game than a player in the Q would get, or a player in the USHL, since USHL, I believe, ages out at 17 or so, where in SHL you play with adults.  The numbers don't average well, unfortunately, so I need to adjust as I decide that the number is too strong or too weak. Therefore they are always shifting a bit, sometimes a lot.  As I was talking about upthread, last week Seb Aho had the second best year among 2015 draft picks, but since then, I've adjusted liiga down, and Aho is now sixth, still a wonderful pick so far for the Hurricane.

 

And yeah, Jamie Benn's strong NHL play influences the value of BCHL 17 year olds, including his own, which makes judging the model by redrafting not very effective, because the model becomes biased from Benn's later play instead of being limited to how he would have looked at the time.  It doesn't affect an OHL player much at all, since there are hundreds, but it keeps me from averaging a league like BCHL, which would be much too highly valued if I just took the average of players' future performance.

 

SHL is also difficult because the strength of an SHL team also doesn't tell you anything about how good the player is.  For instance, looking at a Q forward like MacKinnon, that type of player is normally on a really good team, therefore I can scale the rating by how good the team is, and MacKinnon's relationship to the team (what you(Liger) call percentage of team goals scored).  Finding a relationship between a good team and a good player doesn't work for defensemen, who have a much smaller impact on the quality of the team. (Which is why I would always take Reinhart over Ekblad).  The SHL 17 year old is almost always on a bad team, so I can't use that stat to value a 17 year old William Nylander.

 

Olofsson would score more on a good team, and score more playing with Nylander, and score more in the Q than SHL, and almost none at all on the 2014 Buffalo Sabres.

 

I have tons more data this year, so I'm better with the leagues that don't have many players ending up in the NHL.  Also, from the scoring thread in SabreSpace, I did a chart about how scoring rates change, which I don't use to value players. I think this is important for Austin Matthews, who's Swiss stats are fairly useless to me, and who's 2014 USDP team scored a whole lot more than Eichel's 2013 team.

[LGR4GM]

Thank you.  I always wonder about strength of team. It is one thing that makes me hesitate on a player like Juolevi or on saying Matthews is better. If the only direct comparison we have is a USDP team that scored significantly more points that Eichel's team, is it that Eichel was not contributing as much as Matthews or the more likely case that Matthews had more/better talent around him plus his own.  Again thank you for answering the questions, it really helps me to understand how you are viewing and calculating things. 

[WildCard]

I'm curious rakish, how strong is the correlation here? The r^2 value looks to be a little low for some of those; not to be insulting of course

[rakish]

Need to talk more specifically, who we talking?

[WildCard]

Need to talk more specifically, who we talking?

Detroit specifically. But, say you take out the outlying 2011 pick for the Senators as well

[rakish]

To understand where I am in this WC, I got to look at old charts to see if they make sense, because if the math doesn't work on previous years, it won't work in the future either.  So don't think I take it as an insult, I need to find the mistakes.

 

I'm not sure yet what you're asking, but my guess is that my combined Detroit draft is too low.

 

Detroit recent years

2010: 2163

2011: 2573

2012: 757

2013: 1355

2014: 1729

2015: 1074

 

Carolina : 

2010: 1796

2011: 887

2012: 1420

2013: 1300

2014: 1386

2015: 1806

 

So over the past 6 years, Detroit has gotten 200 points better out of the draft per year than Carolina.  These charts are rather broad-strokes, and I'm really just looking at the relationship between how the team drafts, and how the team wins in subsequent years, and seeing if the model is successfully predicting this or not.  I think you might be looking for the Detroit version of the pipeline thread from last week.  So these are the 2015 rankings for recent drafts.

 

2015:

YEVGENI SVECHNIKOV (raw number 565 , rank in draft among forwards 30th)

ADAM MARSH (265, 76)

CHASE PEARSON (261, 77)

VILI SAARIJÄRVI(110, 51st among defensemen)

 

2014: remember these guys are older, so raw numbers will be bigger

DYLAN LARKIN (1233, 5th among forwards)

AXEL HOLMSTRÖM (814,20)

DOMINIC TURGEON (420,57)

CHRISTOFFER EHN (SuperElit 370,64)

 

2013:

ANTHONY MANTHA (980, 20th among forwards)

TYLER BERTUZZI  (481,63)

JULIUS VÄHÄTALO ( 345,85)

ZACH NASTASIUK AHL (340,86)

DAVID POPE NCAA (194,109)

MARC MCNULTY WHL (597, 18th among defensemen)

MITCH WHEATON WHL (286,41)

 

So going back to this morning's chart.  I think the 2015 draft and the 2013 draft look about the same as they had at the time of the draft, and 2014 looks stronger now because, since Eichel outscored Larkin by a lot when Larkin was 17, the model had Larkin way too low as a 17 year old.

[rakish]

OK, Part 2

 

We'll again look at the combined chart for 5 teams, then break a couple out.

 

The Nashville Predators draft good enough.  They average around 1500, this ought to keep them near cusps for years.

 

The Calgary Flames are terrible at this, or they would be, if not for the New Jersey Devils.

 

Easily the worst drafting team so far would be the New Jersey Devils.  They've been averaging about a thousand the last ten years. 

 

The most interesting chart so far would be the Philadelphia Flyers. They had good drafts 2006 and 2007, then five years of New Jersey level bad, now two years of really pretty good.

 

The NY Rangers had a few good drafts, 2005-2008, and then recently have been using the strategy of trading picks for players, therefore they have had very meager drafts.  It's a strategy, I don't think it will work for them going forward, we will see.

 

Let's examine two of these pipelines, these are the 2015 seasons for recent draft picks of New Jersey and Philadelphia.

 

New Jersey:

2015

Forwards

39 (Among forwards drafted in 2015) PAVEL ZACHA OHL 509 (rakii's raw score, rule of thumb: 1000 is NHL forward, earlier the better) Here  you might have an argument that as a power forward his numbers can be lower related to pure scorers, but don't ruin the narrative for me.

47 BLAKE SPEERS OHL 454

Defensemen

49 COLTON WHITE OHL 122

They also drafted a goaltender and an overager (always a good choice), Seney, so he shows up in 2014

 

2014

Forwards

33 JOHN QUENNEVILLE WHL 645

48 BRETT SENEY NCAA 488

77 CONNOR CHATHAM OHL 277

121 JOEY DUDEK NCAA 60

Defensemen

12 RYAN REHILL WHL 421

44 JOSH JACOBS OHL 214

 

2013

Forwards

38 MILES WOOD NCAA 709    A World Juniors Under 20 team USA participant

81 RYAN KUJAWINSKI AHL 362

113 BRANDON BADDOCK WHL 173

Defensemen

33 STEVEN SANTINI NCAA 382

 

Philadelphia

2015

Forwards

8 TRAVIS KONECNY OHL 1132

19 TRAVIS KONECNY OHL 713

24 COOPER MARODY NCAA 602

53 DAVID KASE Czech2 411  I haven't done enough work on leagues like Czech2, so take with grain of salt

63 MIKHAIL VOROBYOV MHL 368

110 SAMUEL DOVE-MCFALLS QMJHL 83

Defenseman

4 IVAN PROVOROV WHL 795

 

2014: Again, these guys are older, so raw numbers ought to be bigger

Forwards:

21 OSKAR LINDBLOM SHL 805

40 NICOLAS AUBÉ-KUBEL QMJHL 566

59 RADEL FAZLEYEV WHL 404

Defensemen

2 TRAVIS SANHEIM WHL 1082

33 MARK FRIEDMAN NCAA 254

 

2013

Defensemen

24 TERRANCE AMOROSA NCAA 444

30 SAMUEL MORIN AHL 407

50 ROBERT HÄGG AHL 227

64 DAVID DRAKE NCAA 176

 

So when we break these two teams out, New Jersey has a handful of marginal NHL scorers coming, Philadelphia has three very good prospects in Konecny, Provorov, and Sandheim, and a few of marginal NHL scorers coming, Marody, Lindblom

 

 

 

[LGR4GM]

Why is Konecny there at #8 and #19?  

 

The NJD thing makes perfect sense. That is one team that has really baffled me over the years.

[rakish]

Konecny spent half the year in Sarnia, half the year in Ottawa.  In Sarnia, he outscored the second best scorer,  Zacha, by about a half point per game, on a very good team.  I generally average the two, unless they are in different leagues.  Averaging Konecny's raw scores, he ends up about 12th

[LGR4GM]

So in general you want that red line to be trending higher, indicating your draft results have been better?

[rakish]

The slope isn't the key item, it's the height of the bar.  The Red Wings are on a downslope, but they are still averaging 1400 or 1500 out of each draft.  The Devils average only 1000 or 1100 each draft