Position
|
Points
F | 7379
D | 3509
G | 1038
Assuming the point values are accurate, that's a surprising result.
Interesting, thanks for doing that!
So for 51 forward picks, divided into 7379, avg pick pts for forwards = ~144.7
20 defensemen picks, divided into 3509, avg pick pts for dmen = ~175.5
Actually, I don't think that's all that surprising at all. Just the general sense I got from looking at the picks in one sitting is that a lot of the d picks that were made from 2003-2012 were either relatively early in the draft or fairly late -- with not so many mid-rounders. Whereas a lot of the forward picks that were made were lumped in the middle rounds and skewed earlier rather than later.
If that has been the case, then you're going to get
similar avg pts. And since you have more overall forward positions to fill on a roster, you're going to have more overall forward points.
On first glance those #s would seemingly support that the overall drafting strategy has not actually been ignoring forwards at the expense of d-men; but certainly that the picks for d-men tended to be earlier.
Another thing to note, though is -- I'm assuming you lumped all the forwards together? If you wanted to get a # that may be more applicable to what Crease is talking about, looking at the avg pts for center picks vs. d-men picks might yield something a bit different.
--
The last thing to point out is this: I took a quick look at the paper you linked (from which you got the relative point values for draft picks). I didn't read it thoroughly; so apologies if I'm missing something in his methodology that would render this meaningless... But I'm not sure the sample years from which the author chose to use to assign values are very representative of how drafts shake out today; and they probably
over value later round draft picks.
The draft years he used to assign relative values were 1988 to 1997. The mid 1980s to the early 1990s, were some of the first draft years in which Soviet players were drafted who ultimately played in the NHL. Due to the cold war, it just wasn't realistic for teams to expect to draft a Soviet player and have them one day play in the NHL. Soviet players who wanted to play in the NHL at that time, had to defect in order to do so - and the first Soviet defections happened in the late 1980s. Combine this with the scouting of soviet players being relatively poor, and many teams not wanting to take the risk of using early draft picks on these players only to have them be unable to play in the NHL... and you got a lot of damn good hockey players being drafted in much later rounds than they would have been otherwise.
I haven't gone through and done a very thorough analysis/look, but on a few quick looks at some of the draft years in and outside of his sample, there seemed to be significantly more late round gems in those years (primarily Soviets) than in the draft years from the late 90s to today.
