Spencer Knight is all but a lock to be the first goalie picked in this year’s NHL Draft.



If Knight was going to be a top 25 or 35 pick, I wouldn’t write this column. If he was another Jake Oettinger, it wouldn’t be interesting or worthy of discussion. However, throughout the course of the season, I have had serious discussions with NHL scouts about him being a top 15 pick, if not top 10. And thus, it means it’s time to talk about Knight and the concept of using a high draft pick on a goaltender.



It’s commonplace to kick around hockey executives for being “data dumb” and substantially behind other sports when it comes to analytics. The latter has some merit, but when it comes to picking goalies high, NHL teams responded in remarkable fashion to the results of picking goalie high in the 1990s and 2000s. Here is a look at where goalies were taken in the past two decades:



The data from the high goalie picks of the 2000s...