If we gathered a bunch of lotto winners in your living room to enjoy a cup of tea (it’s arbitrary… it could be for beers!), you’d end up thinking there’s a chance it could happen to you too! That’s how the brain works. It’s not really good at understanding random events and omits the unlucky millions who did not win.

I’ve always claimed that the same goes for draft picks.

We are not really good at calculating the true value of distant picks. When we hear “a late R2”, we immediately think this is a lotto ticket that could translate into Lane Hutson (#62 in 2022). We decide to ignore the much bigger odds it will turn into Gleb Trikozov (nothing against you Gleb… just randomly mentioning a R2 selection before Hutson).

The exercise of calculating the true value of draft picks has been done hundreds of times in recent years. The pioneer is probably Stephen Burtch, whose article garnered much attention and brought eyes to this hitherto overlooked topic. https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/analyzing-value-nhl-draft-picks/

Altogether, these analyses show that the expected production of a player decreases exponentially with important inflexion point at rank #5 and 10 to reach some sort of plateau at/around #60.

To put that into concrete numbers: a late R1 only has a 25% chance of playing more than 200 games in the NHL. That’s a 1 in 4 chance.
What about the expected production of that player? (because the impact of Celebrini over 200 games will not be the same as Ben Danford, selected #31 that same year…) Let’s just say that, statistically speaking, someone selected at Danford’s rank is predicted to become a 0.2 points-per-game player.

There are important lessons to be learned from those studies. The most important one is arguably that an efficient reconstruction should accumulate as many top picks as possible (top 10… if not top 5). Another lesson is that we tend to overvalue late R1 picks. There is an aura attached to the “R1” label. But, statistically, a late R1 will likely turn into a common journeyman. One that can be obtained via trades or free agency.

Burtch told us more than 10 years ago… We just have a hard time registering the message.