Charting the Relationship Between Draft Capital and On-Ice Performance
How to build a secondary core and some cautionary tales
In theory, the relationship between draft picks and a team’s on-ice performance is linear.
The better a team performs on the ice, the more draft picks they trade away for immediate help and the lower their draft position becomes. Inversely, the teams that perform poorly have a keener eye on the future by looking for an abundance of draft picks and are closer to pole position in the draft.
So that got me thinking, have there been any outliers from this theory?
I charted the relationship between points percentage and draft pick value and quantity from 2006-2022 to see if I could glean any interesting insights.
Our hypothesis looks correct, as a team climbs in the standings, the value and quantity of picks are inversed.
An extreme example is the reigning Stanley Cup champion Colorado Avalanche who owned a .726 points percentage but only made 2 draft picks with a combined 0.3 GSVA. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the 2021 Buffalo Sabres had a measly .330 points percentage but made 11 draft picks for a combined 29.2 GSVA.
You can find a refresher on GSVA and how I calculated the value of draft picks below.
Only four teams have made three or fewer draft picks in a single season and all of those teams were playoff teams. Four teams have made 13 draft picks in a single season and three of those four teams were non-playoff teams.
That one playoff team that made 13 draft picks was the 2021 Carolina Hurricanes who also boasted a .714 points percentage. And this is a pretty interesting insight into the stages of a team-building cycle.
Building a secondary core
In between the rebuilders and the all-in contenders lie the teams that have their elite core in place and are seeing regular-season success but they aren’t done yet. They are looking to surround their key pieces with a strong supporting cast and in a salary cap environment, this labour needs to be cheap. But it isn’t just Carolina that has been an elite team that stockpiles picks.
The 2011 Chicago Blackhawks made 11 picks which netted them Brandon Saad and Andrew Shaw - two key players in their 2013 and 2015 Stanley Cup wins.
The 2016 Tampa Bay Lightning made 10 picks including Brett Howden, Libor Hajek, Boris Katchouk, and Taylor Raddysh. Howden and Hajek were included in the deal that brought Ryan Mcdonough and J.T. Miller to the Lightning. Katchouk and Raddysh were included in the Brandon Hagel deal. Without these draft picks, Tampa’s dynasty may not have become what it is.
This insight is worthy of a post in itself but it is clear the phase before a team goes all-in to mortgage its future is crucial. Teams should continue to stockpile draft picks to further build up their war chest and install a secondary core of cheap labour.
Cautionary Tales
There are a couple of other outliers that I’ll go over quickly.
2015 Boston Bruins
They are the only team to have at least a .580 points percentage and a combined 22 draft pick GSVA or higher.
The Boston Bruins were coming off a second Stanley Cup appearance in five years but were beginning to move on from some of their core pieces. This resulted in them accumulating THREE first-round picks. They made 10 draft picks that year for a combined 22.5 GSVA.
By now everyone knows the story, the Bruins had the 13th, 14th, and 15th picks. They took Jakub Zboril, Jake DeBrusk, and, Zach Senyshyn. Debrusk has turned into a fine NHL player but the same can’t be said about the other two.
Mathew Barzal, Kyle Connor, and Thomas Chabot, unfortunately, went the next three picks after.
This could have been THE re-tool of the modern NHL. Imagine.
2010 Toronto Maple Leafs, 2021 Vancouver Canucks, 2022 Ottawa Senators
These are the only three teams to have a sub .460 points percentage and also less than a combined 4.7 draft pick GSVA.
Brian Burke famously traded the Leafs’ first-round pick to the Boston Bruins for Phil Kessel. Unfortunately, the trade didn’t push the needle and the pick the Leafs gave up turned into the second-overall pick, Tyler Seguin.
Jim Benning and the Vancouver Canucks traded the 9th overall pick as part of a package that brought Connor Garland and Oliver Ekman-Larsson to Vancouver. Dylan Guenther is already playing games for the Arizona Coyotes while Vancouver continues to struggle.
Pierre Dorion made a huge splash by acquiring Alex Debrincat this past off-season in exchange for the 7th overall pick. Debrincat fits the timeline of Ottawa’s competitive window and is a proven goal scorer.
The common thread between these three trades is that they were made to try and hastily improve a team that hasn’t made the playoffs. The Leafs trade blew up in their face, the Canucks trade is trending that way, and the jury is still out on the Senators.
But the important lesson here should be that trading first-round picks are a practice best done by teams that are already in a position to contend. If a team is trading first-round picks to simply get out of the previous team-building stages, they may end up in a perpetual state of mediocracy.