I was accused almost immediately yesterday after posting “
Do Not Even Consider Drafting A Goalie At 16th” of being somewhat dishonest. That by using the last 8 Draft years I was in effect hiding the 1st Round pick goaltenders who really did pan out. I was effectively accused of cherry picking the data.
I think that’s a little harsh. I thought using the last 8 consecutive years was appropriate when discussing the recent trends in goaltender Drafting. If the pattern of behavior among NHL teams has changed drastically then using information based on the previous behavior is making decisions based on false premises.
Has drafting goalies really changed all that much?
Yes, it really has. Truly.
From 2007-2014 the number of goaltenders drafted collectively by NHL teams in the 1st round was 6. Just six players in that whole time! We have gone 2 straight Drafts without one taken in the opening round. That’s something very interesting because it was not always like that.
In the 8 Drafts prior to that there were significantly more netminders taken. From 1999-2006 there were 23 Goalies taken in the 1st Round. That’s almost a 75% reduction from one 8 season set to the next! There has most definitely been a shift in the way Goaltenders are perceived in the Draft.
Now maybe that has to do with the relative age of Unrestricted Free Agency and maybe it has to do with the fact that so many turn out to be blown picks. We can probably assume it’s a little of Column A and a little of Column B. Changes to the CBA have pushed the UFA age to as low as 25 and goalies take a lot of time to develop, on the whole.
The biggest argument against me and for my line of reasoning is that there are a good number of starters who came from that 8 year period from 1999-2006. So it looks like I was hiding them to support my thesis.
And it’s true that there really are good goalies from that period! There’s Jonathan Bernier, Tuuka Rask, Carey Price, and others that we’ll touch on. There’s also a considerable amount of failed picks and that’s again part of the reason why drafting them so high is a very risky proposition.
Those 1st Round Goalies from 2006-1999 are:
Jonathan Bernier (Starter)
Riku Helenius (Fail)
Semyon Varlamov (Starter)
Leland Irving (Fail)
Carey Price (Great)
Tuuka Rask (Great)
Al Montoya (Fail)
Devan Dubnyk (Starter)
Marek Schwartz (Fail)
Cory Schneider (Great)
MA Fleury (Starter)
Kari Lehtonen (Starter)
Cam Ward (Starter)
Hannu Toivonen (Fail)
Pascal Leclaire (Fail)
Dan Blackburn (Fail)
Jason Bacashihua (Fail)
Adam Munro (Fail)
Rick Dipietro (Fail)
Brent Krahn (Fail)
Brian Finley (Fail)
Maxime Oullett (Fail)
Ari Ahonen (Fail)
By my count that’s a failure rate of 14/23 Goalies or 60.9% if we use the criteria of at least becoming an established NHL starter. That allows me to generously count Fleury and Lehtonen as successes despite the fact that there is almost no way to argue they were value at their Draft positions.
So, yes, there have been several stellar NHL goalies who have been Drafted in the 1st Round. The problem isn’t them. The problem is that they represent the minority of 1st Round Goaltenders and just getting a Starter (very loosely defined) doesn’t guarantee a “Good” starter.
Most importantly though, NHL teams do not Draft goalies in the 1st Round in the same quantity as they used to. Goalies are taken at a fraction of the rate they used to be over the last 8 years. We can thank changes to the CBA for that. Teams simply do not have the time to invest in a player that they could control until he was 30 the way they used to before the Cap era. Goalies take a while and there’s no telling which ones will turn out.
If we try to come up with a Drafting strategy for the Oilers and we are basing that off of an era of Drafting where goalies were taken almost 4 times more often in the 1st round than they are today, then we are making a vital mistake. The quality of the goaltenders has not gone down over the last 8 years. They are still as capable of becoming Rask or Price as ever. However, those prospects that teams believe will be high end goaltenders are now more than ever likely to still be there early in Round 2.
Good goalies can be still Drafted. My intentions in the previous post were not to hide that, but they were to say that recent trends do not align well with taking a goaltender at 16th Overall for good reason. My reasoning behind opting out of drafting a goalie at 16th still stands. They are volatile developmentally, they tend to take a long time to develop into NHL quality, there are better bets available at 16 who can help the Oilers sooner for longer, and there should be no hurry to acquire goaltenders because they should still be there when the Oilers pick again.
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