Some suspect drafting

[Toswammi]

Alan over at small thoughts ( http://smallatlarge.blogspot.com/ )broke down the drafts over the past few years. One thing for sure is our drafting hasn't exactly been all that great.

Quick breakdown of players we drafted with the amount of games they played:
02 Draft
Ryan Sawka (49), Clayton Bauer (277), Marc Dafoe (52), Michael Hengen (226), Jerrid Sauer (331), Luke Hughson (20)
03
Kyle Bortis (236), Greg Alexander (7), Zack Smith (221), Travis Yonkman (143), Karl Benke (68)
04
Paul Postma (270), Grant Toulmin (116), Derek Claffey (183), Matt Tassone (154)
05
Geordie Wudrick (216), Ian Curtis (40), Phil Gervais (106), Jordan Mistelbacher (96), Eddie Friesen (4), Kris Foucault (62), Clayton Cumiskey (130)

When he breaksdown the drafts by games played, we consistantly rank in the bottom three (yah i know it is a bit subjective, but still)

It never really occurred to me but we did acquire a lot of players during Deans reign.

[Brandonite]

You dont know about suspect drafting! haha Brandon drafted Sanfred King in the 1st round and the kid would be hard pressed to play in the MJHL.

[stick boy]

I agree that there were some pretty bad drafts for a couple of years and it showed in the standings.

But the 2006 draft has proved to be a pretty good draft and should keep us strong for a couple of year with Eakin, Hoban, Rogers, Vause, and Wagner all coming out of that draft. As well as Martin and Greyeyes, since traded or released and picked up.

Caldwell's system of ranking the draft also has some major flaws as well though as it judges a draft entirely on games played in the WHL. So even if a player's impact is huge over three years before heading to the NHL he only registers maybe 200 games max where a marginal player sticks as a 20 and plays 310 games. I think most team would rather have the the three-year impact of a first-round NHL pick and all the hoopla that comes with that.

Caldwell also counts all games in the WHL which makes a player's value pretty deceiving. I mean what if you trade away a player for nothing and he goes on to play 300 games, you are getting credit for his games played but he isn't helping you any. Or what if you release them and they hook on with the worst team in the WHL, is his value as great as someone playing 300 games with Vancouver or Calgary? Not likely.

I guess it is cool to crunch numbers for hours and hours but they can be misleading as well.

[AlanC]

Caldwell's system of ranking the draft also has some major flaws as well though as it judges a draft entirely on games played in the WHL. So even if a player's impact is huge over three years before heading to the NHL he only registers maybe 200 games max where a marginal player sticks as a 20 and plays 310 games. I think most team would rather have the the three-year impact of a first-round NHL pick and all the hoopla that comes with that.

Caldwell also counts all games in the WHL which makes a player's value pretty deceiving. I mean what if you trade away a player for nothing and he goes on to play 300 games, you are getting credit for his games played but he isn't helping you any. Or what if you release them and they hook on with the worst team in the WHL, is his value as great as someone playing 300 games with Vancouver or Calgary? Not likely.

I guess it is cool to crunch numbers for hours and hours but they can be misleading as well.

I agree that the means I used to "rank" the drafts isn't perfect. The true determining factor of a draft's strength is quality, not quantity. The team that got two 200-game studs who went to the NHL at age 20 probably came out ahead of the team that got three 300-game average players. The other thing I didn't take into consideration enough was draft position - teams that picked high in the draft should, on average, get better players than the teams that pick later because they get first choice. And I didn't weight that enough.

My main line of thinking though was that all these things average out for every team....every team has picks that only play a few games, every team has picks that play a long time with little impact, and every team has picks that play only 3 or 4 years but make major impacts. So averaging everything together is a fair - albeit not perfect - way of doing this quickly. The only better way to do this kind of thing is to go over every single player drafted and grade them....and that would take so freakin' long that nobody probably has any interest in doing it.

As for the inclusion of players who were released or traded to other teams, the idea was to grade how well teams did at assessing talent in the draft. If a team picked a kid, it's because they thought he had a chance of being a WHLer someday. Whether he becomes a WHLer with the team that drafted him or whether it's with somebody else (for whatever reason), the player was first identified as a prospect by the team that drafted him. So, they should get the credit for being right even if the kid only played for somebody else.

[stick boy]

Agreed 100 per cent Alan, I was just pointing out to Broncos fans not judge our drafts on those stats alone. So many other factors make a good hockey team that don't have anything to do with the draft as well.

ie. we talk about our drafts so much but listing players is every bit as important for a scouting staff too. just looking at the Broncos and our list players over the past few years with Michael Wilson, Levi Nelson, Justin Dowling, Mike Brown, Andrew Hewett, Jordan Peddle, and Jordan Evans. those are some pretty huge pieces of the puzzle

BTW I totally admire your blog and the enormous stats packages you put together they must take a crazy amount of time.