Three Steals from the First Round of the 2016 Draft
By Jeremy Davis
7 years agoDay 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.
You can read about the first round reaches here, but now it’s time to move on to the steals: here are three selections that got better than expected value at their draft positions.
Jakob Chychrun (Arizona)
If you went back in time a year or two and told an NHL scout that Jakob Chychrun would go 16th overall in his draft year, they’d probably smack you across the face for talkin’ crazy. This was a player who was supposed to challenge for the first overall ranking, and held down second overall in most services just nine months ago. Where did it all go wrong?!
Well, I covered a lot of reasons why Chychrun’s stock fell sharply this season in his Draft profile recently:
The expectation that Chychrun would follow up his fabulous rookie campaign with an even more fabulous draft year turned out to be a bit too much to ask, and that’s not really Chychrun’s fault. He dealt with some shoulder problems here and there, and it seemed that the expectations placed upon began to creep into his mind. One of the most common complaints about Chychrun’s play in 2015-16 is that he was “trying to do too much”, as if he knew that great things were expected of him and he was desperately trying to match up.
Unfortunately, he fell short of those lofty expectations. This too was not lost on Chychrun – falling short of was people were hoping he’d accomplish seemed to weigh heavily on him. At the combine, his openness and honesty was praised by many a scout, though his self-reflection evidently turned to self-deprecation, with one scout mentioning that “he was way too hard on himself about his season. I finally had to stop him.”
Even after the season was long since finished, Chychrun continued to drop as the final rankings rolled in. Concerns about his hockey IQ were chief among reasons for this, as well as decision making and consistency. Scouts and analysts began to question whether he would be a top pairing defender, or if he projected more to the middle pairing.
All that aside, Chychrun is still a heck of a defensive prospect, and was probably still worthy of a top ten selection at the draft. The fact that Arizona GM John Chayka (who’s the same age as me ffs what am I doing with my life?!) managed to snag him at 16th overall is a bit of a coup. Disappointing draft season aside, Chychrun’s tools are among the best in the draft class, and given the right developmental strategy, he certainly has the ability to make a lot of GM’s rue the day they passed over him.
Dante Fabbro (Nashville)
As a proud member of the BCHL, it was pretty easy to overlook Dante Fabbro and his Penticton Vees teammate, Tyson Jost, for most of this season. Given the quality of competition that they faced, their ridiculously high scoring numbers were often written off. Fabbro began the season as a projected top ten selection, or close to it, and fell steadily throughout the season. Much of this is likely due to the league in which he was playing. Here’s the ISS rankings for Fabbro by month:
That large uptick in value near the end of the season was right around when he took the ice in North Dakota as a member of the Canadian U18 for the IIHF U18 World Championship – and dominated. Suddenly, he had anaylsts remembering why they had him ranked so highly in the first place.
Still, it was difficult to work around that BCHL stigma, and Fabbro finished the season ranked between 10th and 24th, with an average of 15.4, according to Tom Hunter and Jon Steitzer’s Consolidated Rankings for the Blogger’s Tribune. Even a 15-rank may have been underselling Fabbro’s abilities: Garret Hohl’s SEAL-adjusted scoring metric found that Fabbro created offence at a rate similar to Mikhail Sergachev, a consensus top ten pick.
Fabbro was the fourth highest producing defender according to this metric, following Sam Girard, Jake Bean, and Sergachev. All this is to say that getting Fabbro at 17th is a big win for Nashville, and adds another prominent defensive prospect to one of most highly acclaimed defensive development systems in the NHL.
Logan Brown (Ottawa)
Getting Logan Brown at 11th isn’t quite as big as a win as the first two entries on this list, but it’s still a solid victory for new GM Pierre Dorian and his staff. Given where Brown was ranked to end the season (somewhere between seventh 13th with an average of 9.7), 11th seems perfectly reasonable. Those who are high on Brown, however, are probably shocked that he made it out of the top ten. Dorian clearly wasn’t willing to wait any longer, evidenced by the fact that he traded up from 12th to snag the Windsor Spitfires pivot.
Not everyone has been as high on Brown however. The division of opinions on Brown is likely due to the fact that his season itself was distinctly split. He was simply a different player in the second half of the season than he was in the first. Consider the fact that he was cut from the Ivan Hlinka U18 roster in the summer of 2015, then dominated the U18 World Championship tournament in the spring of 2016, looking like one of the best players on the ice.
For some further perspective, consider these quotes from scouts before and after the New Year:
Early season:
“He was the worst player in [the Ivan Hlinka] camp.” (August 2015)
“So much potential but he is invisible on too many shifts.” (October 2015)
Late season:
“He’s like a different player.” (March 2016)
“I’d be shocked if he slid past 7th or 8th after his play these last 8 weeks. (April 2016)
Exactly what changed in Brown is difficult to pinpoint. There were plenty of complaints of inconsistency, and even laziness. Evidently a scout brought that to Brown’s attention sometime prior to December and he was “shocked” to hear it, not being aware that his effort level had been described as disinterested early on in the season.
In an article on Brown, Canucks Army’s Ryan Biech detailed the rise in production as the season went on, particularly in terms of goal scoring. Brown’s shot is decent, though he doesn’t get if off as much as new GM Dorian would like. Instead, he prefers to set up other players, in the mold of a Joe Thornton, a player he has often been compared to, both stylistically and due to his large stature (Brown measures in a 6-foot-6). Lofty expectations to be sure, given that Thornton was a first overall pick and a former NHL scoring champion, but there is a still a belief that Brown could be one of the best players to come out of this draft, and a bona fide natural centre – possibly even the best centre available not named Auston Matthews.
Only time will tell if Brown can meet those kinds of optimistic projections, but if he comes anywhere close, 11th overall would look like a heck of a bargain.
Scouting quotes come from the 2016 NHL Draft Black Book by HockeyProspect.com.
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