All NHL teams aspire to accumulate talent throughout their lineup. While this can be accomplished through trades or free agency, the most cost-efficient way to acquire talent is through the NHL Draft. Drafted players are cost controlled throughout their entry-level contracts and require only draft picks to get them into the organization.
The Seattle Kraken have been wisely accumulating draft assets, selecting 36 players over the last four NHL Drafts. Early returns suggest that first-round picks like Matty Beniers and Shane Wright will be key contributors. Beniers already has 167 games under his belt, and we can expect Wright to be a full-time NHLer next season.
The Kraken have also seen recent standout performances from a pair of second-round picks. Both David Goyette and Jagger Firkus led the OHL and WHL respectively in scoring last season. Given these developments, how should we evaluate their progress? Statistically, are they tracking as home run draft picks and future stars? Or should we remain more reserved in our outlook?
Performance relative to age
One useful lens for analyzing progress is performance relative to age. Even within the same draft class, there can be a wide disparity in age. For the 2024 draft, top-ranked prospect Cole Eiserman (drafted No. 20 overall by the New York Islanders) is about 10 months (304 days) younger than Artyom Levshunov (drafted No. 2 overall by the Chicago Blackhawks). At this age, 10 months is a huge runway in developmental timeline. This effect is compounded in junior leagues like the OHL and WHL where players as young as 16 and as old as 20 are playing side-by-side against each other every night.
Intuitively, we should expect a 20-year-old to be far more physically developed than the average 18-year-old (the average age of each team was 18.7 in both the OHL and WHL last year). Without the context of age, we may be prone to draw faulty conclusions about a player’s long-term potential. So how can we contextualize the seasons that Goyette and Firkus just had?
In order to draw some rudimentary conclusions, we looked at the top 15 scoring seasons for both OHL and WHL players from 2014 to 2024. The jury is still out on the long-term ceiling of some of these players, but there is enough data to make some inferences. Within the OHL, the list includes current NHL stars like Connor McDavid, Mitch Marner, and Jason Robertson, solid top-six players like Dylan Strome, and bottom-six forwards like Kevin Labanc. We also see players like Justin Brazeau and Aaron Luchuk who, to-date, have been unable to carve out NHL careers.
The common thread here is that standout performances in your 17- or 18-year-old season are often predictive of high-ceiling NHL careers. Standout performances from 19- or 20-year-olds should be taken with a bigger grain of salt. Included in this latter group are Christian Dvorak and Rory Kerins. While the former is a useful albeit replaceable bottom-six forward, the latter may or may not crack the NHL at all.
The WHL paints a similar picture. Two thirds of the top scoring seasons from the last 10 years are owned by 19 and 20-year-old players, many of which have struggled to hold NHL jobs. Kraken fan favorite Oliver Bjorkstrand has found success as a top-six forward while Sam Steel appears to have settled into a bottom-six role.
What is also notable is what the data doesn’t show. Superstar talents do not tend to linger in Major Junior for long. Connor Bedard just won the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s best rookie. By the time he was 20, Connor McDavid had played nearly 200 NHL games and was scoring over 100 points per season. Post-draft, Mitch Marner spent another year with the London Knights before debuting in the NHL with a 61-point season.
With this in mind, we should be wary of projecting Firkus and Goyette as top-of-the-lineup stars. They both had excellent seasons, but their statistical profiles are more in line with solid middle-six forwards. While on the surface this may seem disappointing, this isn’t bad news. It is important to remember that even players selected early in the draft often do not become full-time NHLers.
Looking at five years of draft data from 2010-2014 and using the 100 games played mark as a threshold, we find that 82 percent of first-round picks became NHLers, but that number drops off to only 46 percent in the second round. Even then, reaching the 100 games played threshold is hardly indicative of being a true difference maker on a contending team. Solid middle-six forwards would be fantastic outcomes for Firkus and Goyette, and contending teams need this type of talent in the middle of their lineup to win.
While our analysis leads us to some muted optimism for Firkus and Goyette, we should end on a more positive note. The Kraken’s most recent first-round pick, Berkly Catton, just wrapped up a very special season relative to his historical 17-year-old peers, putting him in rare company. Hockey analyst Cam Robinson summed it up best.
Last season, the Kraken offense was ranked fourth from the bottom of the NHL. In drafting Catton, a dynamic rush scoring forward, they may have selected a player uniquely suited to address this gap.