Why draft Stankoven, a 5'8" winger at 47 when Samuel Helenius a 6'6" center with great defensive habits is right there at 59!
Some of them are undrafted forwards Tyler Johnson, Yanni Gourde, Mats Zuccarello, or Jonathan Marchessault.
Or 2nd/third round stars like Marchand, Point, Debrincat or the aforementioned Stankoven.
Or 4th/5th/6th rounders like Atkinson, Gaudreau, Kaprizov, Mangiapane, Garland.
I would agree that drafting high skill small forwards in the first round generally can be risky. I think it's really stupid when internet scouts have guys like Perron and Stiga in the top half of the first rounds. Guys like Benson and Catton I get, because they have a real shot to be a star based on their production, but these non-consensus first round small forwards I'm hesitant on that high. Still makes it dumb later on when Catton and Benson become top 5 guys drafted outside the top 5, but that's not what we're arguing.
However, once you get into the second is when you can get tremendous value for these picks like Perron and Stiga, as well as small defensemen. It also goes without saying that a guy like Lane Hutson is the shining example of falling because of size, and rising because of play. He's a second rounder that's going to make the NHL this season after breaking NCAA records for scoring by a defenseman. Are we super stoked as a Sharks fanbase that we chose Cam Lund instead of Lane Hutson? How about Havelid? He's a couple inches taller and a bit heavier, clearly the better pick?
And you know who were championing guys like Hutson and Stankoven the most in recent years? Internet scouts.
It's not cut and dried, and it certainly isn't after whatever you think is happening between Perron and Svoboda. Even if it was, let's say Perron wasn't outpacing Svoboda and was already a bust, it's still a good pick. There were no more top goalies left at the spot, most of the real skill was gone by the second.
I'd love to have some numbers behind the arguments, which of course would take work that most of us don't have time for, but my hypothesis is that in the outer rounds, all players have a very small chance to make it as an NHL regular, but small players are no more likely, probably less likely to have a shot. Therefore the "value" argument is only relevant in the draft year itself -- someone has great numbers in a lower league, so they "should" go higher, but they don't, so it feels like great value.
I suspect that confirmation bias would show that small players who make it are almost always "great value" when they're drafted, because they're drafted later than their junior/lower league numbers/profile due to size bias, but if you actually took
all the undersized players, versus just ones that make it, you wouldn't see a probability any higher than a bigger player, and possibly lower.
So if all you were doing was using pure statistics kinds of approaches in drafting, you may always favor the bigger player even if smaller players who hit are typically "good value."
In simpler terms, for every Stankoven (or the other players you mentioned) there are 20 who we aren't talking about, but maybe for every big guy who also isn't expected to make it but does (wildly optimistically, Svoboda), there are only 17 others who we aren't talking about.
I'm not stumping for Svoboda, or any of our prospects by the way... all of them could bust, any of them including Macklin could be a disappointment in 5 years. Definitely not time to declare victory on anything. But that also extends to Lane Hutson and Benson.
Even using our own best draft pick ever -- Doug Wilson himself said "if we were so smart, why'd we wait until the 7th to pick Pavelski." He would have been a steal in the late first/2nd 32 teams passed on him 150 more times. Were they wrong? Probably not, because who the hell would have predicted him? Outliers existing and being great value shouldn't define a strategy imho, and overvaluing "draft value" and therefore picking small players is banking on a strategy that may be riskier probabilistically and depends on "full hits" rather than partial hits. That is my theory, anyway, but it's unproven.
EDIT: by the way, it's clear the Sharks today are not using such a simple heuristic, because for example we have LSW picked right before Pulkkinen. I would have gone Pulkkinen, not the least for his size. Just one example we can follow in the coming years of picking a player who was probably higher "value" at that draft spot over one that was bigger.
