Counting Cards at the Draft – High School Defencemen

In part one of this series I looked at NCAA defencemen determine if a players point total in his draft season had any sort of predictive value for an NHL career. Turns out that there is some merit to that and the estimated points per game is roughly 0.6. I have followed the same methodology in that post but this time am looking at high school defencemen.

First off I would like to point out that my sample size is unfortunately rather small. There haven’t been many defencemen selected out of US high schools, just 60 players in total. Since we are dealing with high schools some statistics are simply unavailable. I was unable to find stats for 20 of the 60 players which cut an already small sample size down even further. Take what follows with a grain of salt due to the small sample size.  

To determine who was drafted out of high school I simply sorted the players by team and league and selected the players who team or league said H.S. This time I used the time period of 1999-2009. I gathered the points per game data from elite prospects.com, and games played data from hockey database. Plotting these points gives up the following:      

To me it looks like the dots begin to take off around 1.5 points per game. Dividing the graph into quadrants at 40% of eligible games played and 1.5 ppg provides the following:

As you can see the majority of players who didn’t make the NHL fell below the 1.5 ppg. That’s an encouraging sign. However the concern here is that the percentage of players in the bottom right quadrant is higher than previous studies. Those players need to be looked at individually to see why and how they failed.

How they Missed:

-         - R.J. Anderson (101^st overall, 2004), Michael Gergen (61^st overall, 2005), Joe Gleason (192^nd overall, 2008) and Alex Velischek (123^rd overall, 2009); all did not carry their scoring touch over to the NCAA.

-          -Andy Sertich (136^th overall, 2004). He split time between defence and forward which would explain why his ppg was so high.

-          -Dan Spang (52^nd overall, 2002). He was in a severe car accident his draft season and dealt with concussion issues, which might explain why his scoring didn’t carry over to college.

-          -Aaron Ness (40^th overall, 2008). He is still trying to establish himself in the NHL. Played in 20 games this season for the Islanders, and at 23 years old may still have a (slight) chance to become an NHL regular.

-          -Brian Lee (9^th overall, 2005). Missed the entire 2013-14 season with an ACL injury. Would have come close to the 40% requirement had he been healthy. Has already played in 209 NHL games.

Jake Gardiner was excluded from this list as he just missed being an NHL regular (36%) but it’s clear he has an NHL job going forward, health provided.        

How They Made it:

There were only two players to fall below 1.5 and have NHL success. They were Ryan McDonagh and Nick Leddy. Not really surprising that these two players worked out. Both were quite close to the 1.5 cut-off (1.43 and 1.45 respectively), and were first rounders’ (12^th and 16^th overall).

2014 Draft Eligible High School Defensemen as per Central Scouting’s final ranking.

Player	Rank	GP	Goals	Assists	Points	PPG
Luc Snuggerud	42	25	8	30	38	1.52
Matthew Berkovitz	61	24	11	26	37	1.54
Miles Gendron	74	22	6	13	19	0.86
Nick Wolff	89	23	8	12	20	0.87
Tyler Nanne	118	25	7	20	27	1.08
Jonathan Barry	147	27	5	29	34	1.25
Michael Lee	156	28	7	21	28	1.00
Billy Sweezey	177	28	8	20	28	1.00
John-Claude Brassard	203	27	11	32	43	1.59

The steal of the list looks to be John-Claude Brassard. As the highest scoring player on the list at 1.59 ppg, he is projected to go in the 7^th round, if he even gets drafted at all. He is definitely worth the gamble in the 7^th or even 6^th round.  Luc Snuggerud and Matthew Berkovitz also have a chance to become NHL regulars. I would avoid all other players on this list as they simply don’t have the point production necessary to be worth taking a chance on. The likelihood of success is too low in my opinion.

To conclude this study continues to support the claim that players who make the NHL are the ones who are producing points as amateurs. In the upcoming draft I would target players such as John-Claude Brassard as he has put up the highest points per game total among high school defencemen who are likely to be drafted. One thing to watch for with these players is how they perform in the NCAA in the years following the draft. If they fail to put up points in college they are likely going to be busts despite their high school numbers.

All stats gathered from elite prospects and hockey database, and information about the players from hockey's future.