Three Reaches from the First Round of the 2016 Draft

Day one (and round one) of the 2016 NHL Draft has come and gone, and 25 teams have added to their prospect pools. With 181 more players set to find teams today, I thought I’d pick through the first round and see who went off the board with their selections, as well as who got good value in their spot.

First up are three reaches from day one, teams that picked players well before they probably should have, leaving a bevy of better players still available.

While you could quibble with the Dubois (3rd) and Juolevi (5th) picks, as both left potentially better players on the board, they’re both defensible selections within a spot or two or where they were projected, and both seemed to have been made with positional need in mind. For my money, the first real reach of the draft came at 18th when Logan Stanley’s name was called. Oddly enough, it was called by the Winnipeg Jets, a team that slayed the 2015 Draft in terms of value selections. Even worse, Winnipeg traded up from 22nd to grab the pick.

For a live reaction, we go to Jets Nation editor, Garret Hohl:

Logan Stanley is a towering defenceman out of the Windsor Spitfires organization, standing at 6-foot-7. He is the embodiment of the type of rearguard that the modern NHL is moving away from – the giant, low-scoring, stay at home defenceman. Stanley put up five goals this season, after scoring zero in his rookie OHL campaign, leaving him with a total of five goals and 21 points in 123 OHL contests. His 0.27 points per game in 2015-16 is by far the lowest of anyone selected in the first round, as is his 6.97 NHLe score. Now seems like a good time to remind everyone that even low scoring, stay-at-home NHL defencemen tend to put up big numbers while in junior.

Stanley is still blessed with a 43.3% chance of playing at least 200 NHL games according to our pGPS metric, but he exposes an inherent flaw in all prospect projection systems – a systematic bias towards height. NHL teams have long since been giddy to gifts roster spots and big minutes to giant defencemen who “take up space”, even when they produce little to no offence. As a result, Stanley’s list of successful matches, while playing a respectable amount of games, were underwhelming across the board offensively. No match has tallied more than 160 NHL points (that distinction belongs to Kurtis Foster), while the average points per game of his successful matches is 0.19.

Given the fact that Winnipeg also went home with Patrik Laine on day one, they still get to call their first round a win. However, they undoubtedly lost value on their second pick of the day, especially considering that they gave up an extra asset to move up and make the pick.

After the debacle that was the Bruins’ first round in 2015, I was looking forward to see how they tackled their top picks in 2016. Their first pick, Charlie McAvoy, was an entirely reasonable decision. However, Boston GM Don Sweeney just couldn’t help himself when he approached the podium the second time, selecting USNTDP depth centre Trent Frederic. The fact that Frederic himself was caught off guard at being selected yesterday should tell you all you need to know.

Frederic scored 20 goals and added 20 assists in 60 games while touring the nation with the U.S. National U18 squad. On a pretty underwhelming U18 team, Frederic was just about all they had going once you got past the top line of Clayton Keller, Kieffer Bellows and Joey Anderson. Beyond that, he scored four goals and 14 points in 23 USHL games, from which I calculated a pGPS of 4.1%, easily the worst value of the first round, and roughly 35% worse than what you’d expect at 29th. His NHLe of 13.4 was also the worst of round one among forwards.

Going even deeper than than that, one NHL scout provides some insight into the circumstances of his goal scoring, noting that “he always seemed to score when the game was already out of hand.”

There are some instances where you feel strongly that the rest of the league is undervaluing a guy that you have your eye on. But when that guy is valued as low as Frederic was, you might as well attempt to get some extra asset value by moving down and taking him later on.

The Florida Panthers have made waves in recent moves because of the way they’ve restructured their front office. This makeover includes the inclusion of two of the brightest minds to grace this space, Josh Weissbock and Cam Lawrence, the team that brought you PCS. Given that their knowledge of the world’s prospect pool is vastly greater than mine, I feel a little bit odd criticizing the selection that their team made last night.That said, they player they picked, Henrik Borgstrom, was not considered a first rounder by any mainstream ranking service.

Borgstrom has size (he’s 6-foot-3), and he plays a premium position (centre), but there are some oddities. For one, he’s an overaged prospect – this was his second year of draft eligibilty, making him the first (and only) draft-plus-one player selected in round one. For another thing, though he tore up the Finnish junior league this year, with 29 goals and 55 points in 40 games, he’s never had a sniff of Liiga, the countries top tiered league. It’s highly unusual for a player in Finland to go in the first round with no Liiga experience – the last example that I could find was Lauri Korpikoski in 2004. And even Korpikoski played with the Finnish U18 team that year – not so with Borgstrom. Lack of international tournament experience is another oddity.

I’m inclined to give Florida the benefit of the doubt, given who they’re employing (though I’ll admit that I don’t know how much influence they were wielding in the first round). That said, 23rd overall just doesn’t seem like a logical fit. Hockey Prospect (who I trust more than most services) had him at 51, while McKeen’s and Future Considerations had him at 79, and ISS had him at 137. Maybe they knew something that I don’t (which is certainly possible), but it’s hard to believe that Borgstrom wouldn’t have been available at 33rd, when the Panthers picked next.