The Ottawa Senators and the Toronto Maple Leafs engaged in extreme drafting in the the 2019 NHL draft.

The Edmonton Oilers? Not so much.

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What do I mean by extreme drafting? Taking players far out of their consensus draft order at the top end of the draft, where most NHL talent is to be found. This could mean either drafting a player much higher than their consensus ranking, which is typically referred to as “reaching” for that player, or it could mean drafting a player much lower than their consensus ranking, which is typically referred to as a player “sliding” or “falling” to a team.

In the case of Senators, the team drafted three players, Mads Sogaard, Lassi Thomson and Shane Pinto, far earlier in the draft than they were ranked by the consensus of public draft experts and lists.

In the case of the Leafs, Toronto used their two top picks to select players whom the consensus experts had ranked far higher. Somehow those picks, Nick Robertson and Mikko Kokkonen, fell to the Leafs.

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I came up with the consensus draft rankings by averaging out the rankings of 16 draft experts, folks from TSN’s Bob McKenzie and Craig Button to Corey Pronman of the Athletic and Sam Cosentino of Sportsnet. I looked at how these 16 experts ranked 72 players (see full list here) , which includes all players who a) had been identified by at least one of the 16 experts as a first-round talent or b) were taken in the first two rounds of the NHL draft.

Photo by Carlos Osorio / AP

Reaching, falling and slotting in as expected

A handful of players — like Jack Hughes drafted 1st overall, Kaapo Kakko, 2nd, Alex Turcotte, 5th, Dylan Couzens, 7th, Philip Tomasino, 24th, and Samuel Fagemo, 49th — were drafted exactly where the consensus of experts predicted they would be drafted. Twenty of the 72 players were taken five spots or closer to their consensus rankings.

The Senators defied the consensus with all three of their top picks, choosing Lassi Thomson at 19th overall when the consensus had him 39, Shane Pinto at 32 when the consensus had him at 55, and Mads Sogaard at 37 when the consensus had him at 80th.

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In saying this, I’m not in any way praising or criticizing Ottawa or Toronto.

Fans tend to see it as a great thing if a player whom the consensus of experts ranks highly slides down to their team later in the draft, but another way of looking at this is that the real NHL experts have looked at that same player and have found him less appealing than others ranked behind him on the public lists.

Who are we to trust, the real NHL scouts or the public lists?

If a player seemingly “falls” to your team, maybe that’s not such a good thing. Likewise if your paid group of scouts who have spent months on the road watching and judging players with their expert eyes and top hockey knowledge rate a player higher than the public expet consensus, as the Ottawa scouts did with Thomson, Pinto and Sogaard, it almost certainly make sense to trust the expertise of your own people, right?

And it could also just be chance that it turned out all of a team’s top picks fell into one category or the other.

Photo by Anne-Marie Sorvin / USA TODAY Sports

Edmonton, reaching and sliding

For example, in Edmonton the Oilers took Philip Broberg 8th overall when the consensus had him at 15th, but they also got Raphael Lavoie at 38th overall when the consensus had him at 22.

A few things of note: with so many players taken well ahead of their consensus draft order, it seems foolish for fans to criticize a GM for failing to trade down in order to get that player. So if anyone in Ottawa is blasting the Ottawa GM for failing to trade down and take the same players, I’d point out that 36 players were taken ahead of their consensus ranking, and only a few GMs traded down to take players in the first few rounds.

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If one GM failed to do this, then almost all of them failed to do this. In other words, it’s a weak critique to make of any one GM, as almost all GMs fail to pull off such a move for one reason or another.

In Edmonton, I admit I was judging Holland a bit for not moving down and taking Broberg later in the draft, but I now see that’s an unrealistic expectation. If it happens, if a team can pull it off, that’s a huge bonus, but it’s not the norm. The norm is to reach to take a player or to have one slide to you.

Finally, it seems from looking at the public experts that if there’s one kind of player they tended to rate higher than NHL teams in the 2019 draft, it’s Euro players. The eight players were all Europeans who had the biggest differential between where NHL teams selected them and where the consensus of experts had them.

At the Cult of Hockey

The Cult of Hockey on the NHL draft