So, you think you know hockey

In the interests of full disclosure, I sure-as-fuck do not know hockey. I might know a little about data analysis and in my now-travel-and-distraction-free life, I thought I would dig into last year's draft. Inspired by Kev's thoughtful analysis, I travelled a bit of a different path.

My take was to look at individual picks by their opportunity cost – the value of that pick relative to the most valuable player still available. I chose total point production over the entire season as the measure of value and scored opportunity cost as the difference between the value (i.e. TOT) of that pick and the TOT of the most valuable still available in the draft. Good picks, by my approach, have positive OC values because they had a larger TOT than any remaining players. Conversely, choosing a less valuable player contributes negative OC. I know, I know, opportunity cost is inherently negative, but I started this analysis halfway through a bottle of wine and couldn't be arsed to backtrack.

My first slice through the data treated managers' individual choices as picking the best player available, no matter the position. I haven't discussed drafting strategy with many, but this approach seemed reasonable to me. Skilled drafters would maximize OC by always choosing the best available player, right? The cumulative sum of the OC for all picks will therefore be highest for the best managers.

Well, we all suck, but with varying degrees of suck. Note the scale is in TOT, and remember the final PF for the last season ranged 1050 to 1350. Sullivan & Kev drafted well, according to this analysis, because of their relatively positive OC and the relative flatness of their drafting trend.

The general trend of the cumulative OC showed a general flattening as the rounds progress – in other words the high performers were being removed from the pool reducing the overall OC of missing good picks.

Another draft strategy is to pick by position, so I constructed a second analysis wherein OC would be calculated for each pick from the pool of available players at that position.

Forgive the busy graph, but I think there is some good stuff here. Each bar represents the average of a manager's picks for that position throughout the draft. The best picks would have positive (or less negative) bars. The lines show the range of OC values for each manager's picks at that position, so good managers should have both positive bars and small lines.

Again, we see Sullivan and Kev come out as relatively skilled drafters, with their nearly positive bars and particularly J's small lines.* And we can see who struggled drafting by position, like the Bealls at RW and Dale's woes at D.

Furthermore, the positional analysis shows the rewards of drafting at G. Many of the goalies drafted last year had very large TOT, and disproportionately contributed to the overall draft performance in this OC analysis. Leighton notwithstanding, 10 of out 15 G had TOT >100 and managers seemed to be better able to accurately estimate their value.

Finally, some thoughts on the value of drafting well. This OC analysis did not produce any good evidence for a link between draft performance and team performance. ESR & ESCH ended up at opposite ends of the standing yet performed relative well in the draft. And obviously, this analysis neglects lots and lots of details, like trades and injuries, so stay tuned for more refinements.

B

* I never thought I would be praising J's small lines.