What I Value in NHL Draft Prospects

In order to get a good understanding of why I like certain players and why I rank them where I do, we first must understand what I value or want in a prospect. As someone who buys into fancy stats I understand the value of puck possession stats and how they help win hockey games. With that being said I value players who can drive possession at the NHL level very highly. Corey Pronman formerly of hockey prospectus and now at ESPN has a great piece on how to scout for possession. In that piece he talks about the key skills to be a puck possession forwards are puck skills and hockey sense, followed by skating. For defensemen it is puck moving skills and hockey sense followed by physical play. These are the same skills that I value and will go into further below. 

Forwards

                I want forwards to be very skilled with the puck, have good hands and creativity. This is obvious as these are the skills possessed by the elite scorers. My belief is that if you can’t score in junior you’re not going to score at the NHL level. When building my ideal NHL team (explained fully in a future post) I want three scoring/skill lines and then a shutdown line. In order to get three lines of skill it will have to be drafted into the system. I value hockey sense very highly as I believe these players have a very high floor. If you have an elite hockey sense in junior it will not go away at the NHL level.  If the skills don’t translate to the NHL the hockey sense will and it will give you a chance again to perhaps stay as a third-fourth liner. Skills are great but the player has to be able to put up points. A player may have all the skills the in world and be labeled a big time scorer, but if he’s not scoring I'm going to avoid him.    

Defense

                Much like with forwards hockey sense is a very valuable skill to have, especially as a defenseman. I want the d-man to be able to clear the defensive zone with a good pass and not turn the puck over in the defensive or neutral zone. It is also critical that defensemen score and put up points. This piece from “That’s Offside” looked at CHL drafted defensemen and what ones were likely to succeed and bust. He found that defensemen who scored below 0.6 points per game in junior made up the majority of busts. Those players were predominately players who were considered shutdown defensemen and were “safe” picks.  The players who didn't score above 0.6 in their draft year and turned out to be successful NHL players were able to improve their scoring to at or above 0.6 the following year.

Goalies

                This is where it gets very tough for scouts. The following two graphs are from Matt Pfeffer (@MattyPfeffer).

               This graph is the value of skaters (in terms of average GVT) based on draft spot. There is a nice pattern here with diminishing returns are you select later and later in the draft. This shows that scouts do a very good job at identifying which players are the best.  

Here is the same graph but now for goalies.

                As you can see here it is very random with no pattern at all. This shows that scouts have a much tougher time projecting goalies. Another great piece from "That's Offside" shows that goalies who post elite save percentage numbers in junior are more likely to succeeded than the goalies who don’t. That is why when I look at goalies I'm going to focus my attentions mostly on save percentage as a goalies only job is the stop the puck and if he can’t do that in junior good luck doing it in the NHL.

              This what I'm going to focus on when I scout players, I want skill guys who can drive possession up front, defenseman who think the game at a high level and goalies who can stop the puck. If you noticed I made no mention of how great a leader a player is, how clutch, how gritty, if their a winner etc. These things to me are all useless. If you have to mention these things about a player I assume that’s because they don’t have good enough skills/abilities to talk about. In reading scouting reports on Jonathan Drouin, Seth Jones, Conner McDavid etc. you never see scouts talking about how great a leader they are or how clutch they are, why? Because their hockey skills are phenomenal. If I see a report that a player is a great leader I automatically bump him down a few spot, because if he had good hockey skills it would be mentioned.  

            Hopefully this gives you a good understanding of what players I like and what I'm looking for in a prospect.

Comments/feedback is appreciated, I'm always looking to improve and learn. Thanks.