Rasmus Sandin flew a bit under the radar after being picked 29th overall this past draft by the Toronto Maple Leafs. And being under the radar is not easy to do in Leaf land. But it was the summer of John Tavares, William Nylander, and the hope of a long playoff run for the big club so understandably a late first round pick was put on the sidelines.

Being left handed also played a factor, with the Leafs left side defense currently manned by Morgan Rielly, Jake Gardiner, and Travis Dermott it made Sandin less of an urgency and more of a put on the back burner type pick. This was a clear contrast to the Leafs prior draft where they selected Timothy Liljegren 17th overall, who is everything the Leafs lack: a high end potential right shot defenseman. There was a lot more riding on Liljegren’s outcome out of the gate that brightened his spotlight.

Additionally, Sandin had less hype going into his draft as he never peaked as high on draft boards as Liljegren had during pre-draft lead up (who was ranked as high as 2nd overall going into 2016-17). Sandin, having been ranked 27th on Bob Mackenzie’s final list, didn’t have that same buzz. If my memory serves me correct, of the mainstream media, I only recall Jonathan Willis of The Athletic being real high on his game (WARNING: article is paywalled). Willis also went on the PDOCast in June before the draft and picked Sandin 15th to the Panthers in his mock draft (timestamp for Sandin talk in the episode is 101:12).

Willis used a model that combined numerical data with input from his co-worker’s (Corey Pronman and Scott Wheeler) draft rankings. The result of this model saw Sandin being ranked 11th on his board, much higher than most would have taken him.







Just look at where Scott (SW column) and Corey (CP column) had Sandin ranked on their board vs the model’s choice. They had him at least 20 spots farther back (39th and 33rd respectively) while every other player in the tier was ranked in single digits. Basically there’s a huge divergence between this particular model’s opinion of Sandin and where some scouts saw his talent level. Willis goes on to say this about Sandin:









Ten Game Breakdown

Draft ranking is all well and good but how has he played since being picked? To do this we’ll compare his results based on other 18 year old defensemen that played in the AHL (specifically those that started in October like he did and not the ones that came in at the end of the year). This list is quite small as only seven players (including Sandin) qualify due to the CHL agreement not allowing the league’s draft +1 players to play in the AHL (though there’s wiggle room for Europeans like Sandin who had been “loaned” to a CHL team). We’ll look at point totals over the first 10 games so that every defenseman is on an even playing field in terms of sample. Here are the results:





Looking at the red bars you can see that Sandin is tied for the lead with Liljegren and Julius Honka in terms of points. What’s interesting to note is how he’s gone about those points: with goals. No other 18 year old prospect has scored as many goals in the first 10 games of a season as Sandin has. It would be disingenuous to not say that his shooting percent is quite high (especially for a defenseman) so he’s unlikely to continue this torrid pace, but it is nice to see this kind of goal production so quickly.

One thing to keep in mind is that Sandin didn’t get power play time at the beginning of his tenure, so he may have had less of an opportunity than others (Liljegren was on the PP right from the get go). It’s tough to say definitively though as the AHL doesn’t track ice time at all but looking at his even strength point production you can see that he has done more damage at evens than any other defenseman not named Julius Honka:





As you can see from the above graph he and Honka lead the way in even strength points and Sandin trails only Hampus Lindholm in primary points at evens. Unfortunately for Sandin, he’ll be in tough for power play ice time this year seeing as both Liljegren and Rosen are options for the Marlies. But if he can garner even a modest level of time on the man advantage over the course of the year it could help keep his point totals up as his shooting percent regresses to the mean.

While Sandin has certainly exceeded expectations, an area where he is somewhat lacking is in his shot production. Some of that may be due to lack of power play time but it would still be nice to see him hit the net more. After 10 games Sandin falls into the bottom half of the group in terms of total shots on goal:





Skater Shots RISTOLAINEN 27 VOYNOV 26 HONKA 20 LILJEGREN 19 SANDIN 16 LINDHOLM 13 KYLINGTON 11



One other thing to keep an eye on is consistency. Sandin burst out of the gate in terms of production compared to the other defensemen but can he keep it up over the course of a long season? Here is a look at cumulative points to see how quickly each defenseman reached their point totals:







Sandin tallied four of his six points within the first 3 games and flatlined a bit in comparison to Liljegren who remained steady in his point accumulation throughout. But looking around at the other defensemen you see that almost every player was inconsistent in some way. Leafs fans should be happy with his quick start as he’s shown to be an extremely capable AHL defenseman but it will be interesting to see if he can keep up this level of production long term.

Looking ahead, as an 18 year old adjusting to a new league there will be ups and downs but there’s certainly a lot to like about Sandin’s game. He moves the puck well, he’s good in the corners, and his production is strong. It’s a bit early for sure, but he’s on track to challenge for the highest scoring 18 year old defender in modern AHL history.





Statistics used in this article are gathered from www.ahltracker.com. Be sure to check out some of my AHL Viz which can be found on my tableau profile