I'd love to see a study or numbers on true top end talent and where it was picked. We get in a tizzy because we never draft high so we can't land top end talent. While it's great to be able to pick top end guys they aren't always top 5 or even top 10 picks.
I can help here.
I've used a metric called ADV (Approximate Draft Value) to measure the relative value of a team's picks over time. Simply put, you take each individual player's career games played, divide it by maximum number of games scheduled for the player's team, and then add up whatever group you want to measure - number one draft picks, groups of picks, whatever. It changes as years go on until it maxes out at 1,760 games (Gordie's record for games played in the NHL). In large groups, ADV comes close to telling you how many NHL-caliber players a team drafts, or how many NHL-caliber players come from a particular part/area of the draft.
The ADV for the top five picks in the draft, between 1998 and 2012, is 49.36.
The ADV of all Predator draft picks, 1998-2012, is 13.93.
Colorado, which has the best draft history in the NHL over the past 25 years, had an ADV of 15.63 since 1998.
The ADV of all number one draft picks, 1998-2012, is 12.10.
In theory, if all we would have had from 1998 to 2012 is number one overall picks, we would have probably had approximately two players
less in terms of NHL talent than we actually drafted.
