Life is unfair. We know that in the NHL because some years the San Jose Sharks pick Macklin Celebrini with the No. 1 draft pick (2024) and other years the New York Rangers use the No. 1 pick to take Alexis Lafreniere.
We know it’s unfair because the Colorado Avalanche selected Nathan MacKinnon (2013) at No. 1 the year after the Edmonton Oilers landed Nail Yakupov (2012). Some years the No. 1 is Mario Lemieux (1984) or Eric Lindros (1991) and other years it’s Alexandre Daigle (1993) or Patrik Stefan (1999).
Life is also unfair because NHL teams spend millions of dollars every year on a player selection process that sometimes only seems slightly better than drawing names out of a hat.
HockeyBuzz looked at drafted players selected over the 12-year period (2010 to 2021) to see what NHL teams receive from the draft.
We purposely ignored the last four drafts because prospects generally need four years of development time. What we found is that unless a team owns one of the first 15 picks in the draft, their chances of drafting a player who will play regularly for the team is iffy at best.
If an NHL GM picked from No. 1 to No.15 in the first round from 2010 to 2021, the team showed a 83,2% (153/184) chance that the player would play 200 NHL games. If his first rounder was at No. 16 onward, his chance of securing a player who will play 200 games is 54.4% (98/180).
The overall percentage for successful first-round picks (playing more than 200 NHL games) was 69% (251/364) in our researched years.
The raw numbers provide a good overview of the draft, but not the entire story. For example, the 2010 first round only had seven players who didn’t reach 200 games (Dylan McIlrath, Jack Campbell, Brandon Gormley, Joey Hishon, Quinton Howden, Mark Visentin and Emerson Etem). The 23 of 30 for reaching 200 games is 76% But Beau Bennett (200) and Jared Tinordi (205) were barely over the 200-game mark. Plus, Alexander Burmistrov (342) didn’t live up to expectations. If you don’t count them, the 20 out of 30 success would then be 66.6%. But this first round also had Taylor Hall, Tyler Seguin, Cam Fowler, Brock Nelson, Nino Niederreiter and Charlie Coyle. Analyzing draft success is complicated. But the raw numbers do support the idea of the difficulty of restocking your team through the draft.
The coin flip success rate of picks in the second half of the first round is why GMs have become increasingly willing to move those picks at the trade deadline.
The second-round numbers are more dreary. Teams only landed on a player who played 200 NHL games 34% of time from 2010 to 2021. There wasn’t much difference between the first half (67/187, 35.8%) of the second round and the second half (58/181, 32%) of the round. After the first round, only 14.7% of the draft picks played 200 NHL games.
Once you moved past the first two rounds, NHL teams only found a pick who played 200 on 10.8% of their picks over a 12-year period. Only 197 draft picks selected after the second round were able to reach 200 NHL. That’s 16 players per draft year. By contrast, there were 88 undrafted players who played 200 NHL games in the same period.
Makes you wonder why the NHL has so many rounds in its draft