With the fourth pick overall in the 2022 NHL Draft the Seattle Kraken will select the best player available. At least, they should. With a still growing prospect pool and multiple needs in their system, they should select whichever player they deem to be the best, regardless of position. If that player happens to be Slovakian defenseman Simon Nemic, then that’s the player they should take.
Nemec, 18, is one of two Slovakian players – joining countryman Juraj Slafkovsky – projected to be a top-five draft pick. Standing at 6-foot-0 and 190 pounds, Nemec is a right-shot defenseman with offensive upside which does also fill a hole in the Kraken prospect pipeline.
This past season the young Nemec played professionally in Slovakia for HK Nitra as well as in a number of international tournaments for Team Slovakia. In 39 games with Nitra he had 25 assists with one goal while getting 20 minutes a game of ice time playing with and against older players. He recorded six points in eight games for Slovakia in the IIHF World Championship where he played against older players again, including a handful of NHLers.
Most draft prognosticators and self-proclaimed experts have Nemec going to the Kraken in mock drafts. He’s widely considered the best defenseman available in the draft, and if he’s still available at pick number four, the Kraken would benefit by taking him.
What the scouts say about Simon Nemec
The one phrase that seems the most consistent in scouting reports on Nemec’s game is ‘two-way’ defenseman. That’s hardly a bad thing, but if you’re looking for a defenseman who is going to race up the ice with abandon, that’s not Nemec’s strong point. He’s more well rounded than that.
He’ll retrieve the puck and get it out of the zone for you but also fill in and join the rush. Nemec sees the ice well and is a top-notch distributer. His numbers bear that out as he’s been a high assist guy who doesn’t shoot the puck a lot. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have good shot, because he’s often praised for it and scored five goals in his league playoffs, so maybe he should look to shoot more.
He’s solid manning the point on the power play and is an agile and quick skater who doesn’t panic under the pressure of forecheckers. There’s a lot to like in Nemec’s scouting reports and video, and if he is indeed the Kraken pick, it will be interesting to see how he performs at July’s prospect camp and in fall training camp.
How soon can he make the jump into the NHL? Those camps will give us a good idea of how the timetable might look.
Simon Nemec on film
While he doesn’t shoot a lot, when he does, he can bring it, as he does here after winding up a big slap shot from the high slot for a goal.
Make it 4 goals and 8 points in ~9 playoff games for Simon Nemec.
His awareness, defense, and offensive sense are on display here (wearing number 7) as he helps with the puck retrieval and rushes up ice to be available in the slot.
Simon Nemec (#7 bleu) du #2022NHLDraft est réellement talentueux dans la relance rapide et la création de surnombre. Même si j'aimerais le voir plus agressif pour décocher des tirs (descendre plus bas), on ne peut qu'apprécier sa mobilité #TSLHEspoirs@Toutsurlehockeypic.twitter.com/NDurZYQW44
The Stanley Cup Final is over, and the Colorado Avalanche are the champions. Now, teams across the league will look to find the next Cale Makar, as their focus turns to the 2022 NHL Draft. The draft kicks off on July 7, just nine days from this posting. The opening of NHL free agency will certainly receive more attention, but there is no more important event for the Seattle Kraken this offseason than the draft. To help you contextualize the selections on draft day, we’ve come up with the inaugural Sound Of Hockey composite draft rankings big board.
Important note on using the Sound Of Hockey Big Board: If you want to filter the data by various categories, highlight row 3, then select “Data,” “Filter Views,” and “Create New Temporary Filter View.” This will allow you to manipulate the data in a way visible only to you.
Focusing on the draft
The Kraken could not replicate the inaugural season sizzle delivered by the Vegas Golden Knights. Thus, whether by design or necessity, Seattle must now build from the ground up. This starts with the draft.
Fortunately, the Kraken made up for a lack of deals off the hop by making a slew of trades at the NHL Trade Deadline. As a result, they are well positioned to make noise at the draft. Seattle has 12 picks overall, including six in the top 68, and 10 of the top 132.
While it is certainly possible the Kraken won’t use all of these picks, this abundance of draft capital means the Kraken can reasonably expect to walk away with approximately three future NHL contributors.
Furthermore, the abundance of picks in the 30’s-60’s might very well play into a strength of Ron Francis-managed front offices in identifying undervalued second-tier talent.
Ron Francis’s draft picks versus the NHL average; visualization by NHLtoSeattle
Introducing the 2022 NHL Draft compositebig board
The Sound Of Hockey composite draft rankings big board lists 675 potential draft prospects. For each of these prospects, we compiled basic player data from Elite Prospects and the NHL Draft combine, mostly via Mark Scheig, including:
draft year club team and league;
position;
handedness;
birthdate and age;
reported height and weight;
NHL Combine measured height, weight, and wingspan (if available), and
draft year club team games played, goals, assists, points, penalty minutes, goals against average, and/or save percentage
Additionally, we pored over many public draft guides and rankings, compiled the lists, and built a composite big board of top prospects in the 2022 NHL Draft class. The goal was to assemble a list reflecting the “consensus” or “average” view of the draft-eligible players.
We did this by taking a weighted geomean of reputable, public, “final” postseason prospect rankings. 331 prospects were listed in one or more of the draft publications we consulted and therefore are “ranked” on our board. The remaining prospects are all ranked tied-332nd.
The full draft board is in a Google Sheets document here. Here is a summary of the ranked results:
Building the board
After gathering basic player data, we ranked the players using the following sources:
Corey Pronman of The Athletic (link) ($$): 127 ranked prospects
Scott Wheeler of The Athletic (link) ($$): 100 ranked prospects
Chris Peters of Daily Faceoff (link): 100 ranked prospects
If you have recommendations for other strong sources to use in future iterations of the draft board, drop us a line on Twitter or in the comments below.
As noted above, after gathering this information, we then took the “weighted” geomean of these ranks. Why did we use geomean? Read up here.
Weights were assigned based on our assessment of the depth of experience, sourced reporting, and/or scouting insight factored in. For example, the rank assigned by the Elite Prospects staff was emphasized the most heavily in the calculation, followed by McKeen’s, and so forth. There was no “magic” to these weights. It was a subjective assessment. Perhaps in future iterations we will crowdsource these weights or develop a system based on the accuracy of a forecaster’s projections from previous years. (Also note that the big board includes an “unweighted” geomean rank.)
If you click through to the full composite draft board, you will see that many of the individual rankings are blacked out beyond the top handful of rankings. This is because those rankings are behind a paywall. To get to Corey Pronman’s full list of 127 prospects, for example, a subscription to The Athletic is required. While we utilized all of the individual rankings listed above to develop our composite list, to encourage support for these paid resources, we will not be sharing subscriber-only individual rankings in the public version of the composite big board.
Finally, it bears emphasis that the composite big board does not reflect our view on these prospects. We’ve read reports, watched some videos, and crunched a few numbers. Andy Eide has profiled several prospects and has come up with a few draft-day targets. I’ll be putting up a few thoughts of my own. But we’re not scouts. The big board is simply a tabulation of the rankings of others. A player’s ranking has nothing to do with whether any of us “like” the player or not.
Utility of a composite draft board
Why attempt this project rather than simply follow the “best” public scouting service you can find? To be honest, the latter approach is in many ways preferable. A consensus board cannot explain why one prospect is ranked higher than another, and it certainly cannot displace the work of scouts or reporters.
But a composite board can provide some added information. Think of it as the cherry on top of the sundae, not the sundae itself.
How so? 2022 NHL Draft prospect Brad Lambert is an instructive case. He has long been an elite tools projection, but his production has underwhelmed as he moved around club teams in Finland. Some are still willing to bet on the latent upside. The Hockey News draft analyst Tony Ferrari has Lambert fifth on his board, as does Smaht Scouting. So, he’s a high first-round pick, right?
Perhaps not: Some see Lambert as a player trending in the wrong direction. Respected TSN draft analyst Craig Button lists Lambert as unworthy of any first-round pick, much less a high first-round pick, ranking Lambert at No. 42. Others list him on the first-round bubble.
Our composite approach looks to exploit the wisdom of the crowd of public analysts and places Lambert at No. 14. This ranking may blend the upside and risk Lambert presents and situate him in a “fair” or “expected” position. Perhaps Ferrari or Button are ultimately right, but it may not be wise for an NHL team to bet on either extreme when faced with such uncertainty.
Seattle connections
Four Seattle Thunderbirds made the big board. Defenseman Kevin Korchinski checks in at No. 13 overall. Forwards Reid Schaefer and Jordan Gustafson rank No. 52 and No. 66, respectively. And, perhaps most gratifying of all after his remarkable playoff run, goalie Thomas Milic made the board at No. 176. Milic has a chance to get drafted after being passed over a year ago.
Final thoughts
With that introduction, here again is a link to the composite 2022 NHL Draft big board. Bookmark it, share it, and consult it between now and the draft. We’ll return before the draft with some opinions on big board value targets, and with some mock draft predictions.
*Post edited on June 28, 2022 (1:00 pm PT) after adding Bob McKenzie’s ranking to the big board.*
*Post edited on June 29, 2022 (7:45 pm PT) after adding Scouching analytics rankings to the Big Board.*
*Post edited on July 1, 2022 (1:15 pm PT) after adding FC Hockey, Dobber Prospects, The Hockey Writers (Baracchini), and Bleacher Report rankings to the Big Board.*
*Post edited on July 4, 2022 (9:30 am PT) after adding The Hockey Writers (Zator) and Recruit Prospects rankings to the Big Board.*
Having built a base trade value chart using only intra-season trades, my next project was to look at trades involving picks from multiple years to determine how teams value future draft picks in trades. In other words, analyze the time value effect on draft pick trades. What additional value did a team obtain if it agreed to convert a present draft asset into a future draft asset?
With respect to the NFL draft, the well-worn “conventional wisdom” suggests a one-round premium would need to be paid to get a team to move into the future. A team trading a fourth-round pick in the upcoming 2022 draft would demand a third-round pick in the 2023 draft in return.
I wanted to do slightly better than “conventional wisdom” or hand waving, so here we go.
Approach
I isolated the trades involving a one-for-one swap of a pick in year X for a pick in year X+1. This yielded a list of 60 trades.
As I have described previously, there is an obvious limitation in analyzing deals involving future picks; when a team trades in year X, it does not know where the draft pick in year X+1 will fall precisely.
To deal with that uncertainty in this rudimentary year-over-year analysis, I have presumed that NHL teams are able to reasonably approximate the future draft pick position of the picks they obtain; teams may err in both directions in their estimates, but on average their projections are sound. Therefore, I used the actual draft position of the year X+1 pick as a proxy for the teams’ prediction at the time of the trade.
I then ran the 60 sample trades through the value chart as if they were intra-season trades and looked for a trend in the error rate. The four 2021 trades are listed in the chart below.
One note before moving onto our findings, high picks were not frequently involved in future-pick trades. The highest pick traded in this type of swap was pick No. 65, which was traded in 2014 for a third-round pick in 2015. Without any future pick swaps in the first or second rounds to guide us, any model of discount value in this range is speculative.
Three Takeaways
1. Future draft pick trades did not generate a “full round” of value. In almost every instance, this additional value obtained in a draft pick trade into the future was not close to a “full round” worth of additional value. Instead it was most often the equivalent of moving up somewhere between five and twelve picks. A trade generating value in this range could reasonably described as “fair” based on historical precedent.
2. Mid-round picks traded into the future create small, but real, draft pick value. For third- or fourth-round picks traded for a future asset, teams received on average an additional 5.98 “points” of draft pick value. This is a significant result. And, under the value chart, it is roughly equivalent to obtaining an additional late fourth-round pick.
3. Late-round picks traded into the future create marginal draft pick value. For picks traded in the fifth, sixth, or seventh rounds, the additional value received by the trading team was minimal, registering at just .19 additional “points” of draft pick value on average. This is roughly the equivalent of a late seventh-round pick. It is also within the error range we might expect to see in a normal intra-season transaction.
This suggests to me that towards the bottom of the draft, teams trading into future years are less focused on value generation and more often driven to trade because they do not see a player on the board they want to select or because they would rather use reserve list space elsewhere. This is speculation, though.
There are other potential explanations. It could be that teams are not particularly accurate in predicting where their trade partner will fall in the draft in year X+1, perhaps because of optimism bias. If so, this would leave the trading team, on average, with less value than they believed they were receiving when the trade was made.
Methodology Postscript
At first I attempted to create a unified model that would link the draft pick value points of a current-year draft pick to an expected return of additional draft points if that pick were traded into the next year. For example, if pick No. 97 was traded into the future, how many points should be expected in return? How about pick No. 125?
Unfortunately, the best fit models did not yield a strong model for all picks. The most intelligible fit was linear and it was quite weak:
The x axis in the above is the draft chart pick value traded into the future. The y axis is the net draft pick value received in return in year X+1. This is usually a positive value but is sometimes negative. The trend line attempts to discern an expected additional value of trading a pick this year into a pick next year. In chart form, the expected additional values derived from the trend line are as follows:
The numbers have some intuitive appeal, but I cannot really endorse this model because of its weak predictive value.
Last summer, Seattle Thunderbirds winger Reid Schaefer prepared for his first full season in the Western Hockey League with some grueling workouts. That’s standard for hockey players, but Schaefer would get a surprise in the fall when the NHL Central Scouting Service released its first rankings for the 2022 NHL Draft and Schaefer’s name was on the list as a prospect to be selected.
“I wasn’t really expecting to see myself on that list,” Schaefer said after a recent Thunderbirds practice. “It was great to feel noticed. It’s definitely one of those confidence boosters and to see that just makes you want to get that much more hungrier and just rise up the list.”
Being rated a ‘C’ skater was a surprise because coming into this season, Schaefer had played 25 WHL games over two years and had three assists with no goals. But the scouts saw something in the 18-year-old from Spruce Grove, Alberta.
Schaefer was an eighth-round pick by the Thunderbirds during the 2018 WHL Draft. Eighth-round picks normally don’t end up on the NHL Scouting list, but at 6-foot-3 and 213 pounds, Schaefer was noticeable.
It turns out, the scouts were onto something with Schaefer. His first goal of the 2021-22 season came right away on opening night in Portland, and that was just the beginning. By the end of the regular season Schaefer had 32 goals, and with his Thunderbirds team in the Western Conference Championship Series, he’s scored six more times in 14 playoff games to go with 11 assists.
How did he go from zero to 32?
“I got my feet wet [last season] and learned what it takes to be successful in this league,” Schaefer said. “Really took it into my offseason and just worked hard and came into this year with that mindset. I’m just going to give it all and just work hard and I think it’s definitely worked out this season. I’ve been having some success.”
“It was awesome to be on a big stage like that and be noticed,” Schaefer said. “Such a cool experience. Not everyone gets to have that experience in their life. To be able to be a part of it was definitely awesome and I really enjoyed it.”
Reid Schaefer turned in a monster year for the Seattle Thunderbirds. (Photo/Brian Liesse)
He didn’t find the back of the net in that game but was noticeable. He created chances and was making plays at both ends of the ice. The highlight of the night came late in the game after Schaefer made a power move to get in close to the net for a scoring chance. Before he could unleash a shot, however, he was tackled from behind by the opposing defenseman.
That defenseman happened to be his Seattle teammate, Kevin Korchinski.
“Just battling against your own teammate,” Schaefer says of the play, with a laugh. “That never really happens so for him to get a penalty against me was pretty funny.”
Schaefer has never been to Montreal but says he’s hoping that he and his family make the trip this July to hear his name called at the 2022 NHL Draft.
What do the scouts say about Reid Schaefer?
Whether it was the 32 goals or the Top Prospects performance, Schaefer has climbed up the draft rankings. On some lists, he’s ascended all the way into being a potential first-round pick.
The upside for Schaefer is somewhat obvious. He has the size, he has a good shot, and he can skate. That’s an attractive package for scouts.
“He’s a strong, two-way winger with some scoring touch,” an NHL scout says of Schaefer. “He made some real nice strides in his game since the beginning of the year. He could add a little quickness overall.”
Schaefer describes himself as a power forward who has some speed and grit to his game. When it comes to what skills he wants to improve on, he agrees with the scout.
“I’m definitely looking to enhance my quickness,” he said. “I think my first three strides, I want to be better at and be more explosive, but also my lateral agility. Just being a bigger guy, I want to be able to shake defenders and use my speed to my advantage.”
Reid Schaefer on film
It’s one thing to have size, but Schaefer has some speed and hands, which here he uses to create a scoring chance while fending off an opposing defenseman.
The more you watch, the more details you see. Reid is terrific at supporting positioning, subtly moving into pass reception spaces, and using his size to leverage possession. Add soft hands into the mix too. #2022NHLDraftpic.twitter.com/YzU6qg5BYj
— Puck Preps Western Canada (@PuckPrepsWestCa) April 7, 2022
Schaefer scored nine times on the power play this past regular season. Here you can see that he can get into scoring areas and has a quick release and gets a good shot.
His shot is an asset, and he can score from all over the ice. Here he leans into a slapper from the point.
Working on the Reid Schaefer profile, so I'll be tweeting about him throughout the night. First, he's a threat to score based on his shot alone, but this one surprised me. pic.twitter.com/KgoNmJf6IF
Using trade information from CapFriendly–i.e. the most indispensable site known to hockey fandom–I compiled a list of trades involving only draft picks from the 2008-09 season through today. I filtered the trades on CapFriendly to entry-draft-related trades, since this is when almost all such trades would occur. Then, if a trade involved a player or a player’s signing rights I discarded the trade from my sample because I wouldn’t be able to compare the value of the player to the value of the picks swapped. This yielded a total of 184 pick-for-pick trades.
From that list I further narrowed the data to include only those trades of picks within a single draft year. I did this for two reasons. First, it is intuitive that a draft pick this year would have more value than the same draft pick next year; the team potentially receives the benefit of the player sooner. This is a basic time value concept. Therefore, when building a draft pick value chart, trades for future picks would need to be discounted. But how much? We can’t answer that in the abstract, so future-pick trades could introduce some bias.
Second, and more practically, the actual draft pick position of a future pick is ordinarily unknown at the time of the trade. Seattle may know it is acquiring Florida’s 2023 sixth-round pick in a hypothetical deal, but what pick would that be exactly?
For these reasons, when constructing the basic trade value chart, I used exclusively draft-pick-only trades made within one season. There have been 98 such trades since the 2008-09 season.
This information was then processed through various functions to determine best fit and through a maximum likelihood analysis, followed numerous spot checks, and a few manual adjustments, as described below. I then normalized the values so that the first overall pick would be worth 1000 “points.”
Key limitation: Uncertainty at the top
One significant limitation of this study: Since the 2008-09 season there have been zero instances of a top-10 pick being traded in a pure pick-for-pick swap. The highest pick traded was the 11th pick, which happened twice–once in 2016 in a swap for the 12th and 80th picks and once in 2019 in exchange for the 14th and 45th picks. The lack of data in the top 10 undermines the concept of a “descriptive” trade value in that range. Any “value” I can ascribe in that range is an extrapolation–and more or less speculation.
As it turns out, the top-10 values produced by my model were too “flat” in my opinion. They indicated, for example, that the first overall pick could be acquired in exchange for a package of the fifth overall pick and the 36th overall pick. This rang false to me. It seems to me it would take more than a high second rounder to move from five to one.
So, for the top-10 picks, I manually built the projected pick value on a steeper curve commensurate with Dom Luszczyszyn’s GSVA model of the draft. My thought was that the projected quality of the players that high in the draft could serve as a reasonable proxy for what teams could be expected to “pay” to acquire the pick.
Setting aside this admittedly improvised solution for the top-ten, the actual values indicated by my study are reflected below:
I also linearized the decline in draft pick value from approximately the mid-fifth round through the end of the draft to reflect that there was a marginal but real decline in value for each of these picks. My original models flattened or were otherwise less logical by this point of the draft.
Trade value chart performance
This model performed well on the whole. Attempts at manual adjustments over the last few days have typically worsened its performance as a descriptive tool, so I’m confident this is fairly close to the market. The chart yielded an average error and median error of less than one “point” of trade value, with a good deal of the error coming in a small handful of transactions where a team paid an atypically high price to move into the top-half of the first round.
The performance is particularly strong considering the model has no way to adjust for the quality of the specific players or the depth in a given draft. For example, in one year, there may be 35 players that a team considers to be “first round” talent, but there may only be 15 such players the next year. Presumably, a team making such an evaluation would be willing to trade more to move up into a late-first-round pick in the former year rather than the latter year.
A few parting thoughts
1. Few trades overall. It was notable to me that over a span of 13 years, there were only 184 pick-for-pick trades in my sample. NHL teams are fairly conservative and comfortable “sticking and picking” when it comes to the entry draft.
2. No top-of-the-draft pick swaps. As noted above, I was surprised that since the 2008-09 season there had been no pick-for-pick swaps in the top-ten. Going farther back, there are examples of such trades and the returns for trading down were typically exorbitant. Qualitatively, this supports my decision to upwardly adjust the value of top-10 picks in my model. That said, again, the values I have ascribed to trades in the top 10 should be taken with a fair amount of salt.
3. It is costly to move up. The decline in trade value is steep near the top of the draft; this makes it “costly” for teams trying to move up. For example, a move up of just six or seven picks in the high second round could cost a team its third-round pick. Perhaps as a result, there were very few trades in which a team climbed more than a dozen spots in the draft.
4. Overall trade behavior may not have changed very much since 2006. This is something I want to look at more closely, but the trade value chart I discerned is not entirely different from the chart developed by Eric Tulsky looking at trades from 2006-12. This chart is a little steeper, i.e. more costly to move up, but it is not different in kind. This is just one data point, but it suggests to me that there has not been a seismic change in how teams look at the value of draft picks over the last 15 years.
As the Seattle Kraken wind down their inaugural season in the NHL, fans will undoubtedly start to turn their attention to the 2022 NHL Entry Draft. The Kraken were very active during their first NHL trade deadline in the middle of March when they made six trades that returned 10 draft picks over the next three years. Combined with three draft picks they accumulated before the start of the 2021-22 season, plus the standard seven picks per year that all teams get, the Kraken will have 34 picks over the next three NHL Entry Drafts.
Seattle also has the second most picks in the upcoming 2022 NHL Entry Draft with 12 picks.
To help better understand the value of those draft picks, we are going to spend some time framing how these picks translate to NHL players and when we might expect some of them to make it to the NHL. For the purposes of this analysis, we are excluding goalies from the data. Goalies have a very different timeline on their path to the NHL and will be the subject of a future story.
Long-term outlook by draft round
Every player’s path to the NHL is different, and some take longer to develop into regular NHL players. So it is not just about when they break into the league, but what they do when they get there. We will be using ‘games played’ as the metric to assess the long-term contributions of draft picks. Of course, there are other ways to evaluate a player’s ability and contribution, but for now, this metric will let us keep it simple.
Here is a look at the games played by draft round for players drafted from 2010 to 2017.
This chart signifies the importance and value of first-round draft picks as almost sure things to make the NHL. Returns for players selected in the second round tend to drop off quite a bit, as 28 percent have yet to play an NHL game. The steeper drop comes in the third round where close to 50 percent of the players have not and might not ever play in the NHL.
It is important to note that the data could be understating expectations since several players are still active and will continue to accumulate games played as their career continues. For example, Kraken forward Kole Lind was drafted by the Vancouver Canucks in the second round of the 2017 draft. He has only played in 20 career NHL games and is poised to be a regular in Seattle’s lineup next year.
It is not a perfect projection, but directionally, we feel this is a good indicator on setting the expectations for eventual returns from draft picks.
This also does not mean that players taken later than the third round are useless. Johnny Gaudreau, Jean-Gabriel Pageau, and Jaccob Slavin were all fourth-round picks that have played over 300 games in the NHL. The chart should just drive the point home that the more picks you have, even in the later rounds, the better your odds that you may find the next John Klingberg (fifth round), Brendan Gallagher (fifth), or Mark Stone (sixth).
First season expectations
It is also important to evaluate when we should expect a drafted player in the NHL. It is rare that we will see players drafted in the summer and then playing in the NHL the following season. In fact, there are usually fewer than five players drafted that play more than 25 games the very next season.
Here is a look at the players that made the jump to the NHL immediately after their draft year.
Based on this information, it is safe to assume that we will not be seeing any of the Kraken’s four second-round draft picks playing in Seattle next season. But the question is, when can we expect them to play in the NHL?
We looked at when players “make it” in the NHL by determining when a player plays his first 25-plus-game season in relation to his draft year.
As expected, players taken in later rounds take a bit longer to break into the NHL compared to earlier rounds. For first rounders, the biggest spike of players (57 players) breaking into the NHL comes in the second season after their draft year but years three (44 players) and four (40 players) still have a lot of first-round draft picks breaking into the NHL. Second-round draft picks tend to break into the NHL in seasons four (39 players) and five (34 players) in relation to their draft year.
This should temper some expectations on when we will see the likes of Ryker Evans (second-round selection in 2021) and all the other future second-round draft picks putting on the Kraken jersey.
Ron Francis draft track record
There is a general feeling in the hockey world that Ron Francis drafts well. Sebastian Aho and Jaccob Slavin are often the poster boys for this belief in Francis’ drafting abilities, but how does he do across all draft rounds compared to his peers?
If we isolate the Carolina Hurricanes draft picks while Francis was the general manager, we can compare his drafted players with the rest of the league in that same timeframe.
This is a relatively small sample size, but you can see that Francis’ first-round draft picks might have under-performed a bit compared to the rest of the league. But across the rest of the draft, he does better than the rest of the league. This should be encouraging for the Kraken who have 11 picks after the first round in this upcoming draft.
It is also worth noting that two of Francis’ picks are about to jump tiers. Both Jake Bean (first round, 2016) and Morgan Geekie (third round, 2017) are expected to bump into the 101 to 200 games tier this week.
The draft pick outlook
Francis’ track record is solid, and the early evaluations of the Kraken draft picks selected last summer have been encouraging. Kraken fans should also feel good about the bounty of picks accumulated at the trade deadline, but remember that it can take time for players selected to become regulars in the NHL.
