Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: 4, p. 97 welcome back. This week we are going to begin an examination of some of the critical.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Issues that are facing the game itself, now that we've moved past some of the media topics that we've been discussing over the past few weeks. If you have a look at the articles from today, they are posted on brightspace. There's one here from Robert Diener, Aaron Loewen and Steven Cobley, and one from Peter Tingling, Kamal Masri and Matthew Martell. These are the articles I'd like you to focus on this week.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: And this is, I think, a really.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Fascinating topic, one that I think a lot of you have a lot of interest in, and maybe not just about specifically hockey. Maybe it's a sport that's like football, for instance, or basketball, but it's an issue that is fac. That is important to all sports in North America. Certainly today's topic is going to be about the NHL draft. This might be something that you know a great deal about, it might be something that you're not totally familiar with, but the concept of a draft or drafting. And this is something that, again, is very, very conventional in North American sports. And if you're a fan of sports from Europe, you'll know that drafting really isn't a thing in European sports. But in terms of the industry itself and the issues that come with it, I think it's does bear some sort of acknowledgment here early on in this discussion that's just sort of in our minds picture what a draft really is.
So if I told you that you are entering a draft or there's a draft coming up, there's probably only two contexts that you're familiar with. And if you're a sports fan, there's there's two. But for the vast, overwhelming majority of the public, if you've said to them that you're entering a draft or a draft is. Is beginning, there's really only one context in which you've heard that being used, and that is, of course, conscripted into military service involuntarily. Now, the reason that these things, these two words have been used, is it does display this notion that there isn't a lot of control over where you end up.
Now, I again, as I implored you in the first week, if there's something in a particular issue in the hockey industry that seems normal, that seems like it's the way we've always done things, I want you to look even harder at those things. And I encourage you to think deeply about what A draft is. And the issues at play here as it relates to the labor market. You have studied sport and labor, you've studied negotiations and contracts and all these various things throughout your sport management time here at Brock. And I think it's the time we apply that specifically to the concept of a draft. Now, I know that in previous classes you've talked about drafting and the various implications that go with it, but I think it's important now that we take some time to acknowledge that, that drafts themselves don't have to occur, don't have to exist forever. They have chosen for specific reasons and they have specific benefits for clubs and franchises. But again, they are a way of distributing talent throughout the league. And the lottery system that goes along with it is another part of that. I have a small little piece of your course reading that's been posted about the lottery and the draft process as well. Just to fill you in if you're a little unsure of what the draft is.
But again, it is something that there's an entire industry just based around the draft. It is a mechanism that is extremely good for acquiring talent, cost control talent. Again, that is something that's very important as well, because in the hockey industry we are dealing with a salary cap. We're going to be dealing with salary cap talk and as it relates to escrow and collective bargaining a little bit later on in this week. But inside there is a contractual mechanism related to the draft called the entry level contract. If you're familiar with it, that's fantastic. If you're not, that's okay. Have a look. You can Google ELC Entry level contract. And the thing about an ELC is it allows teams to control their assets more effectively and to build their team more cost effectively. And this is part of the reason that the draft is such an important part of the roster construction process. But I want you to think about this in terms of an industry itself. Because of those contractual mechanisms that allow for players to to be controlled more cheaply. You can see why the draft itself has become such a lucrative industry in and of itself. It's also an entertainment product. I think the NHL draft in recent years has become far more entertaining as a product. Certainly growing up, it really wasn't always the case. Certainly the NFL draft has become a three day entertainment spectacular.
The NBA draft's a big, big, big deal coming up. And it's actually coming up very, very, very soon. If you're listening to this in the week of June here in 2023.
So these products, these large entertainment products on top of what they provide for the franchise themselves mean that getting drafts correct is extremely important. Drafting in the 80s and 90s was less about absolute precision and more about sort of a shotgun approach to gathering as much as many darts at the dartboard as possible. Now, there is an extremely scientific process at work here.
Byron is a really interesting example that I want you to sort of pay attention to, not just in his site that he runs. It's called hockeyprospecting.com and again, it's a paid service that allows you to purchase a membership to this site that allows you to evaluate prospects in cohort groups going back decades. I think what's important is just for you, if you're interested in this material, if you're something that you're interested in, becoming a draft person or a scout person. Just seeing and listening to Byron's journey here, obviously he just, he's worked with NHL teams, he's worked in draft rooms, he's worked with scouts, but he has chosen to sort of forge his own path. It's actually something you're going to hear during our discussion of advanced statistics, which is next week when you're speaking with Jack Han and Dom Lichten.
They also have this same sort of journey where you start working with large organizations and you end up forging your own path. I want you to listen to what Byron says about how hard it is sometimes to become someone that's permanently ingrained in the architecture of the draft as it sits in hockey, even though the draft is this extremely important part of roster construction. So it's a fascinating topic as a whole and it's something that, again, I want you to as you're listening to Bayern, as you're going through the article that I've also posted for today's first story, this week's content, I want you to think about the draft. I want you to think about the concept of the draft. Is this an equitable thing? Do you think it helps? Do you think it harms? Are there alternative models available? There are lots of sports that don't have drafts. Major League Baseball sort of has a draft. It sort of doesn't really. Isn't really the primary mechanism for acquiring international talent. Not suggesting that Major League Baseball has a perfect system, but I am asking you to think deeply about the implications of what the draft is.
So certainly your favorite team, if you're a hockey fan, you're you care about them as draft picks or trading of draft picks as assets or asset management of those picks or signing these picks, all of These sort of things that go into managing a draft well, they all have fascinating labor implications, fascinating competitive implications and again, as I've mentioned to you before, don't always have to exist in this exact fashion. So I want you to listen to Byron's guest lecture and if, again if you have any questions for Byron, he's asked that you can, you can send them off to me and I'll send them off to him, put you directly in touch with him and I do encourage you to head to hockey prospecting.com just to have a look or follow him on Twitter. He's an excellent follow on Twitter. If you do have Twitter yourself and you are interested in, in hockey prospects, again something I will mention to you, again as I mentioned to you early on in this process, perhaps you don't really care very much about this aspect of the hockey industry. I totally understand that being something that you think that this is, this is not really worth your time and that's totally okay. It is important even if you're interested in other aspects of the hockey industry, to understand how important drafting is to the competitive construction of a roster and ultimately the financial allocation of that franchise as well as. So again if you're interested specifically in marketing, you have to understand the way that draft picks are marketed, the way the draft is marketed, the way the team is able to market themselves through the draft, through the rebuild, through all of these various elements of marketing. If you work for a team, you will not be in control likely of how that team performs on the field of play.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: But you will be in control of the messaging of the operations of all those other things and they relate directly to the draft. So again, have a listen to Byron. If you've got any questions for Byron, send them off to me and I would happy to put you in touch with them.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: We are joined now by Byron Bader. Byron, thank you so much for joining SP4 9 4P97 here at Brock. Byron, thank you so, so so much on behalf of the whole class.
[00:08:39] Speaker C: Yeah, no problem. Thanks for, thanks for inviting me on. Happy to, to discuss my, my realm in hockey analytics for sure.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: So Byron, tell me about your how did you get into to analytics and hockey advanced stats? What was your journey like getting to this, this field in the first place?
[00:08:54] Speaker C: Yeah, so I've always kind of had like a numbers background like even when I was a kid I like keeping track of like my relative like birthdays and stuff. And I was, my mom would tell me that I would actually go like nuts when I had to like update my internal repertoire with like somebody else's birthday and somebody's now a year older. So I've always had that since I was like a little kid.
And then, you know, in my schooling, you know, I, I majored in psychology, but then minored in economics because I always liked that number side. And then I did a master's in management, management science, kind of, you know, doing like a thesis and all this type of stuff, doing the, getting into the advanced analytics and the, the predictive modeling, that type of stuff. So it's always kind of been part of my background and that's, that's where I work in my professional world as well. And then yeah, I've always been a massive hockey fan. Obviously I was into the stats and stuff and you know, 10 years ago type thing when this stuff was starting to creep up and there was different, different things starting to creep up with the hockey analytics sort of revolution happening. That's when I kind of got really into it and you know, you see it happening on, on the baseball side and on the basketball side and then it kind of really started to spike up with hockey. And yeah, it was just a natural fit for me, like looking at all that stuff happening within games, you know, what's, what's, what's leading to goals and possession and all that. But then, you know, from breaking off from there, my interest was, was big time into like drafted prospects and what they look like coming up. And if there's any sort of trend that you can kind of pick up on that, you know, this is what a superstar looks like before they make the NHL type thing. And as I started kind of researching that, I found that this was kind of a whole missing within the analytics world. There wasn't a whole lot on there. So that's kind of how I ended up where I am now and what I've been looking at in terms of my analytics. So yeah, it's been a journey since the beginning of my life basically that just got me here slowly.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Awesome. So the draft, obviously something we're going to be talking about a lot today.
Do you have your first recollection of the draft? Was the first time the draft started to really interest you as a sports fan?
[00:11:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I kind of pay attention to it like here and there in college and stuff. So this would be like in the kind of mid 2000s. I was, I'm from Calgary, so I grew up a Flames fan, so I kind of pay attention for it for the Flames, but I didn't really have an idea of what was going on with these prospects? You just kind of trust what you hear on the TV and stuff.
And the big kind of shining moment where I really started to get into it was probably 2011 or soon after that was the year we drafted Johnny Goudreau. And then you could kind of see him, you know, rapidly developing in college and just getting better and better and better. And that was where I kind of started to look like, oh, this guy looks like he's going to be really good. And looking at his production within college and looking at something called NHL equivalency, which is basically how points convert over to the NHL. When a player makes a jump from a certain feeder league and starting to look at that and how he was just making these big, massive jumps. And I was basically just kind of curious how often that happens and how often the player looks like that. So, yeah, I'd say 2011 was kind of the big jumping off point. The point where I started really starting to look at drafts very closely and track what was happening and track the players coming up and that type of thing.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: When you first started looking, if you're using 2011 as an example, was there.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Did you notice any trends?
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Did you have any suspicions or hypothesis. Hypothesis and hypothesis about what? The kinds of things that were being overlooked perhaps in the draft or, you know, that that word did you hear often they market inefficiencies. Did you have a gut feeling before you started looking into it?
[00:12:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, maybe not that early. It was kind of probably a couple years later once, you know, you could kind of see the emergence of Johnny Goudreau. And when I was actually writing for Flames Nation, which is a analytical Flames blog, and you know, just looking at like a little sample and basically my hypothesis was, which is when you hear it, it's like extremely obvious, but, you know, it's. It's still missing in prospect valuation in the NHL is the ones who basically produced the most at the youngest age tend to be the best NHLers, which is absolutely what happens and is completely common sense. But for some reason it's kind of missed out on with. With drafting over the years. And a lot of it is, you know, different, like intangible things that come in. Like, you know, size is a huge one.
So like a guy like Johnny Goudreau drafted in the fourth round, he's very tiny. If he was three or four inches taller, he probably goes in the first round type thing, right?
And then different things like the league that they're coming from, people are perceiving those leagues as better or worse than they actually are. So they're kind of skipping over players where they're coming from different places in Europe. If they're not in the main hubs in Europe or the main cities, they're getting overlooked a little bit. So that was kind of.
My hypothesis was there was a gap there that teams and scouts and, and, and you know, all the hockey ops people there, they're basically focusing on a type of player and they're selecting him and like the.
They. They think they can mold a player into whatever they want. But my hypothesis was that actually wasn't happening. And like, you should basically go with the ones that look really good at the draft because those are the ones that are going to kind of end up the best as NHL. So, yeah, that was kind of the missing. Was this very obvious thing just hanging out there. You know, when you're, when you're selecting teams as kids and you're kind of picking the. Both sides, how do you select those teams? You look at the kids who perform the best and then you say, I want Bobby and then I want Johnny, and then I want. And you go back and forth until the kids at the end who are the ones who, you know, aren't the best at that sport, are the last ones left over. So it's, it's kind of following along this, this same line. Like the ones that are producing the best at such a young age are probably the ones that are going to produce the best and be the best players in the NHL when they make it there.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: So what's interesting about the way you describe that sort of. Sorry, the, the process that you mentioned there, I mean, you mentioned how it's essentially common sense, you would imagine.
But one of the fascinating things about the draft as a process is it's not really a discussion of.
It's certainly more art than science seems to be. And in certain sports. You mentioned baseball, you know, analytics and statistical analysis has provided a lot of new information. What's interesting about the NHL, and certainly I'm sure this is the way that you interacted with it when you first started following the draft, is the fact that you're not really dealing with everyone using the same textbook here.
This is certainly a lot of teams that are using a lot of different types of information, and there's a lot of sort of different points of analysis that go into it. But what's fascinating to me is with something you mentioned there, that point production, which is seemingly extremely easy to tabulate and calculate, seems to be undervalued as opposed to the role of intangible skills and size and all of those things. So did you see that when you first started looking at the draft as a whole? Did you notice certain teams with certain tendencies or was it sort of. The league was. Every year was a different story.
[00:16:30] Speaker C: Yeah, so probably more the latter there. So basically what you have happen with teams is they, I mean, especially from this side of picking up on these, these players that are, have the high probability of making the NHL and have this high production when everything's sort of normalized by each league, they didn't really pick up on that. And like some years you'd find like, oh, this team really picked up on it this year. Oh, maybe they're onto something. And then you'd look like one or two years later and they would completely change course and they would start choosing players that don't look at all like the players they were choosing two years ago. But they don't really realize what the difference is. And even, you know, from talking to, talking to teams and consulting with them, that type of thing, like you really get an idea of what's happening. Like, you know, they, the management turnover is so rampant with these teams that it's, you know, from a three or five year period, it's rarely the same. So you never have that kind of consistency where it's like, oh, this team has been drafting, you know, amazing every single year for a decade or two decades because the people within that change and then the ideas and the philosophies change around it. So yeah, it kind of changes year by year. You know, you talk to some of these guys and they're like, oh yeah, this year, you know, I asked them, you know, this year went really well for you. Like, what were you focused on? Were you focused on, you know, bringing up different things? And they, you know, they're not really aware of it. It's like you, you drafted a lot of overagers this year that looked really good.
Like, were you aware of that? And then they just say, yeah, we, we knew we drafted a lot of overagers and then we tried the same method the next year and it didn't work out. So then we kind of went away from overagers and. But then you look at the overages they drafted the next year after and they're all these kind of like low probability guys that really had no chance, but they don't fully grasp what's happening. So yeah, it's, you know, the trends change so much, especially by team because there's so much changeover and so much new information coming every year that, you know, it hasn't been tracked in a way to say, you know, to be able to look at like a path over like a 10 year period. And you're going to follow this path for 10 years and see, you know, what happens at the end of that 10 years. It's, it's a very year to year type thing.
You know, in any given draft there's 200, 300 sort of eligible players that are in the draft. And then each team, like you said, they bring in all this intangible stuff and you know, the stats, but then they also bring in the anecdotal stuff from the scouts and all this stuff and then they really focus in on about 50 to 75 players. Each team does this and their, their lists are going to differ from everybody else and they might have this guy that is a top 10 talent on one team and it doesn't even show up on the list of another team. So yeah, it's like a constant changing thing that hasn't really followed any sort of patterns and the teams within it, they're just not consistent and it's always changing for sure.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: So that's great information. I mean there's this lack of continuity. Makes sense, right? They talk about this often. You hear this in basketball where every GM is making every draft pick to try and save his job, right? That over and over again you're trying to just live day to day. So the idea of like, oh, we're going to draft a Johnny Godron, it's going to take six years, like, well, I'm going to be here in three, so I mean, maybe I'm going to be shying away from these sort of players who haven't traditionally succeeded. What's interesting is what you're bringing to the table here. A wealth of statistical information that says, look, I have something to share with you about the kinds of things that make players successful. How receptive has the hockey world been to that kind of information?
[00:20:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean actually like surprisingly receptive. Like when I was, you know, first building this thing out and this idea, I first started talking to a couple teams and it took a little bit to sort of, you know, get in the door and get them responding to your emails and stuff. But then after a bit, you know, I was able to, you know, present to them and kind of show them some of this stuff. And then once they see it and they can visually see what's happening, then they start to Become on board and, you know, working with teams and stuff. Like, you know, I've never been super close that I'm in the scouting meetings, that type of thing. Like, I'm kind of more on the outside providing information to like, the analytics people and then they're sharing it back up. But like hearing back from them that like, oh, the scouts are like, really interested in this stuff and they want to see it from this different angle and they want to see, you know, yeah, different. Different factors brought in or looking at a different way.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: So it's.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: The reception's actually been, you know, pretty good.
More so than I kind of thought it would be with such a traditional kind of scouting sport that hasn't really evolved into those analytics from the drafting side especially. But yeah, the reception's been actually pretty phenomenal considering.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: So is there any aspect of what you're. What you're, what you find through your work and what you find through the results that you produce? Do you find that there's certain results that, that some people are less likely to want to hear? Like, is there something that. Do you ever see friction among certain results or is it again, different for every player?
[00:21:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it differs by team and it differs by the player. I mean, the biggest friction you'll probably find is where, like with my data analysis and looking at all the comps and the history is, let's say you have like a top 10 talent and you say this guy doesn't look like a top 10 talent to me because of X factors. And then you show them, you'll get some pushback that way because everybody agrees, oh, this guy's a top 10 talent. And what you're missing in your data and they'll bring up these factors that they're seeing in their day. And then from the other side, you'll get a lot of pushback to players that you see in the model that have a certain profile that look like they're going to be really good and they kind of bubble to the top, like, oh, this guy has like over a 50% chance that he's going to be a star in the NHL. But nobody's really talking about him as like an early first rounder or even maybe a first round pick. Then you'll get some friction that way. Well, this guy, you got to be weary of this guy because of the skating or because of his attitude and all these different types of things. So that's kind of the two biggest sort of friction points where you'll hear a lot of, you know, and it's cordial and it's nice, but it's a. I don't agree with you because, you know, it's. If you're going so vastly against the hockey world's essentially public opinion, then you're going to get some pushback for sure.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: That makes sense. It reminds me a little bit of something that long ago Bill James was talking about with baseball, where he said that the greatest skill of statistical analysis is the ability to use it against baseball's long history.
And that's something I really enjoy about your work, is it's not about taking any one year's performance and saying this is predictive, because it's saying, look, this performance is either the greatest outlier you could possibly imagine, or in using history in that way, actually, it speaks to me, certainly someone who cares a great deal about history. I look at that, I'm like, well, that's really intelligent the way that you say, like, well, generally speaking, look, it's not me, Byron Baer, just saying these things. I'm telling you, here's the sample, here's his comparables, here's the sorts of players. And this is. I mean, I know that this is work that's done, you know, in other places as well, but I really find that would be a much more successful approach with traditional scouts, where it's like, hey, you remember scouting guys back in the 80s. You remember some of these guys in the 90s. Like, this is what the numbers tell us he looks like. I think that that's a really fascinating way to sort of build your process. Can you tell us about building hockey prospecting? How did that all come about? How did you get the idea for it? And when did you sort of decide to take the plunge to do it?
[00:24:20] Speaker C: Yeah, so like I kind of mentioned before, so the big kind of defining moment, or when I started this whole process was basically with Johnny Goudreau. So I was a rampant Flames fan, and you could kind of see this little guy coming. And like I said, he was essentially doubling his production, like, every year. And I was looking at these equivalency numbers. So each league, there's realistically about 50 leagues around the world where a player could come from and make the NHL. You know, maybe there's a couple more, but about 50 leagues, and most of them will come from about 20.
So this was a method that was sort of developed probably about 20 years ago now by Gabe Desjardin and then expanded on by Rob Vollman, who's with the Kings now. And, like, even, like, Kent Wilson, who's, you know, kind of one of the founders of Flames nation, and Taylor and I both know him quite well, he was big into this stuff. So it was a method that existed to kind of look at, oh, this player has, you know, 100 points in 60 games in the OHL.
And then you take that point per game pace, what does that equate to in the NHL? And you kind of look at it like an average of players who have made that jump, and that's how you come up with these equivalencies. So that existed, but this idea of, you know, what a player look like, essentially like a superstar look like, what type of equivalency did they have before they made the NHL? And so it started with Johnny Goudreau. So in his last college year. So which is his college year, his third college year, he had an equivalency, I think, around 60, which is really, really high. And he was, you know, pretty young guy. So then I started to look at, well, who's had an equivalency that high and then made the NHL and what. What did they look like? And it didn't really exist. Like, I kind of had to piecemeal it together because I was like, who.
Who had an equivalency that high? I don't know. So I started looking at, you know, hall of Famers. You start looking at, you know, Joe Sakic and Steve Yzerman and all these guys that have come up, and it's like, oh, they kind of look like that. So that's kind of obvious. These guys are all top five picks. And then they ended up in as mega superstars. Okay. And then I started breaking it down to, okay, let me look at first rounders and see what they look like.
And see, you know, did the ones that ended up as stars, did they have these super equivalents, high equivalencies, when they came in? And sure enough, they did. And so I started kind of going back and forth further and further back. Start off with kind of five years of data, and then 10 years, and then you break it out to, okay, now I want to see second rounders and third rounders and see what they look like. And the trends were they're very consistent patterns that have existed for decades and decades. And the further I went back, I mean, once you kind of normalize the data by each era, every sort of decade, it's this very consistent thing that when you hit these certain numbers by a certain age or the younger you do it, the more likely you are to step into the NHL and turn into a star. So that's kind of where it all started.
So, Yeah, I got 10, 20, 30 years of data now. So now it goes back to 1990 and I just started talking about it on Twitter and through Flames Nation kind of in the earlier period and chatting with teams about it. And, you know, there was interest in it, but people didn't really know what it was. I didn't even really know what it was. So I was trying to explain this thing that basically doesn't exist. I'm trying to explain these production development patterns and you have to kind of hit these. You have to be jumping through these different levels and through these different hoops. And that's your sign that you're gonna, you know, make the NHL and you're gonna thrive in the NHL and you're gonna turn into Johnny Goudreau and not just be like, you know, a guy who makes 50 games in the NHL or never even makes the NHL and just busts out. So, yeah, it was kind of a slow process. You know, I started off on Twitter with like a hundred followers just talking about this stuff. And then it slowly started to grow to the point that, you know, now there's some people listening to you, now there's some people, you know, referencing you in articles and retweeting you and that type of thing. And it's just grown and growing. And then I think I got to, you know, about 1000 or 1500 followers and there seemed to be a decent enough interest in it.
I'd worked with a team just for the 2019 draft and, you know, went pretty well. But then you're kind of, you're sort of on the short term lease with these teams because they bring you in and they're like, okay, we've learned some from you. And then they kind of move away and they do their own thing. That's how it goes.
So then I thought, well, you know, there's, there's like 30, 30 million hockey fans in North America. Like maybe there's enough interest in this, in the public to, to basically create this resource for fans and teams to use. And that's basically what I've done. So I created Hockey Prospecting, which is essentially a subscription based website. So it's, you know, a subscription fee every year. And then you go in and you can play with these different models that I've built and access all this data going back 30 years and you can see the history and the trends yourself. So, yeah, that's kind of how it all Started, started off as a, a slow burning idea until you kind of realize, yeah, there's some interest in there and there's actually something here that, you know, hasn't been done in this way that's, that's kind of original. And then, yeah, it kind of took off from there.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: So the way you sort of discuss prospects on Twitter and the way you discuss it even on your site, I find it really refreshing because it's not just about, well, here's the percentages of their success. It's like, well, here's some guys who've done well. And then you also include, like, look, there are some people that had this profile that busted, right? This is. And I think this is something that's really. From way outside this world. But I think it's really annoying when I see people be like, well, you said this guy was going to be good. That's the part of the draft. It happens every single year. I mean, I'm sure we all can remember players that we were sure were going to be successful. And like, not from a, from your perspective where you have a lot of statistical information about it, but like, I think back to recent years where you look at guys and it's just, it seems so obvious because they're human beings. This stuff happens all the time. And I really appreciate the sort of context that you put things in, certainly with the sampling. I love the idea of going back that far. Even though the game has changed so much. Trends like that, generally speaking, are able to translate. But have you noticed that there's any sort of.
Have you noticed certain trends within the draft profiles that have indicated that the game might be changing in a way? Like, have the numbers sort of been began to be altered since you first started looking at drafts and saying, since 2011, like, have the numbers started to change a bit?
[00:30:58] Speaker C: Yeah, so the big one, I mean, there's. There's a couple ones that I've noticed.
There's still guys being overlooked a little bit where it's like, hey, this guy has a really good chance. But, like, he'll have something, you know, a characteristic about him that the scouts really don't like that'll kind of drop him down. That's still happening. Like, there was a guy this year, his name, Sasha Pastor, job should have been. I mean, there's. There's no way there. He was taken in the third round. There's no way that there was, you know, I don't know where he was taken 70th or something. There's no way that there was 70 players that you know are going to work out better than him. So he should have been at worst, you know, a early second round pick. So that stuff is still happening. But the big one that I've noticed that has changed is, is these, these big guys that are low scoring defensemen or low scoring forwards that before you would say, oh, this guy's going to be like a top 15 pick because, you know, he has a lot of these translatable skills and he's huge and we're going to turn him into a player. These are the guys that tend to bust out a lot. Like these guys bust out at like 80, 90% depending on what you're looking at. So I've seen a trend to kind of move away from those guys and not draft them top 15 or in the first round and you're kind of, you know, maybe you get in there late, second or third round. That's one trend that I've noticed like even over the last probably five years is more and more data is pointing towards these guys often don't make it. So don't take them early certainly, or at all.
And then the other one is kind of the love for the shorter players or essentially the really good shorter players. So, you know, if you look back in the 80s, like, even if the player was like elite, elite, they're probably not going until like at least the fifth or sixth round. Like Theo Fleury, six round pick. Like if you look at him in the model, he looks like, you know, Joe Sakic, he looks like Steve Izerman. That's what he looks like. But he's five, eight, so he actually goes as an overager in the sixth round. And then even in the 90s, like, you know, Marty St. Louis completely skipped over for five years and then signed as a free agent and then waived and then turns into a superstar. Years after that, like there was still, you know, short guys, still weren't being chosen early. Even in the 22 thousands and the kind of, you know, most of the way through the 2000 and tens, they're still getting picked much later than they should be. Especially these really elite ones that have this really good profile. And even though they're small, the smaller ones that look like this tend to make the NHL. So now essentially, especially the last three years, I would say you've seen this huge jump of guys that are 5, 10 or shorter that are being picked much earlier than they have in any other decade. So they're being picked, you know, they're still going a little bit later than they probably should. Like a guy like Marco Rossi in 2020 goes ninth overall, probably should have been a top five guy. You know, Cole Caufield, I think he went 13th or 14th, like probably should have been a top 10 pick.
So it's still a little bit later, but like these guys are now into the first round, they're into the late first round, they're into the second round. Whereas, you know, even five years ago a lot of these guys would have been chosen in the third round on. So that's, that's one big sort of positive for those short guys that have been overlooked for, you know, since the beginning of time that they're finally getting a little, little tiny bit of respect and being, you know, taken, taken more where they should.
So, yeah, those are kind of some of the trends that have come out for sure.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: That's fantastic.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: I won't keep you too much longer here. Byron. The for someone who say they're a hockey fan, they're not really into the draft, perhaps, what would you say to someone who's looking to sort of get into advanced stats or get into drafting? What would you say to someone who's looking to sort of start their journey onto becoming someone who follows the draft?
[00:34:44] Speaker C: Well, check out hockeyprospecting.com first off.
But yeah, like, I mean the big thing for me is, you know, having an understanding of, of the players coming up and what they look like and you know, who they kind of compare with historically. Like that's, I mean, that's a big benefit of my site is, is it provides comparables of who they look like and who has kind of had a similar looking, you know, career. Like in terms of my model is a points based career kind of normalized by each league. But you know, you hear these comparables each year when you're trying to, when you're following along on the TV and stuff. And there are these comparables that are, you know, oh, this player looks like this player and then you look at them and you're like, wow, there's nothing really similar about those players at all. But this is, you know, this is a way to actually see, yeah, this guy looks like these five different players. And then you start to get a grasp of how rare a certain profile is or you know, how common a player looks like this and never actually turns into a star.
You know, there's, there's a couple different profiles like that where these guys are drafted all the time in the top of the first round or at the end of the first round. And they basically turn into a star, like, once every five to seven years, but they're still drafted, so just starting to understand, you know, what those players look like and the profile of an amazing player. So, I mean, essentially, so you're for a fan of the team, so you're not, like, disappointed when your team drafts a guy and you're thinking, oh, like, everybody's saying this guy's gonna be a star, and then he doesn't work out as a star, and you're, you know, you start to pick up on the trends. Well, he never had the profile that he looked like he was gonna be a star anyway. So, you know, finding more data sources, there's more and more kind of popping up.
You know, a lot of it's in the. In the Twitterverse or, you know, in the public as very affordable options, just like hockey prospecting. So just finding more and more data like that and starting to grasp an understanding of the players coming up in the draft. And, yeah, so you can basically just start anywhere and just kind of learn as you go.
[00:37:00] Speaker A: So, Arin, thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing all of your insights. And Definitely check out hockeyprospecting.com London.
