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The Canucks went for players that either think the game well or have excellent skating
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Published Jun 29, 2024 • Last updated 4 hours ago • 4 minute read
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Tom Willander puts on a Vancouver Canucks jersey after being picked by the team during the first round of the NHL hockey draft Wednesday, June 28, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. Photo by George Walker IV /AP
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No player drafted after the first round of the NHL draft is perfect.
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Heck, even most of the players drafted in the first round aren’t.
The difference, of course, is that as the draft progresses, the players available just don’t have as much talent to work with.
Once upon a time teams could take a late-round roll of the dice on a smaller player who had high-end skill, but as teams have got better at drafting, especially over the past decade, players like Henrik Zetterberg — who fell to the seventh round in 1999 despite already having played one season of men’s hockey and having scored plenty at that — just aren’t there to be found anymore.
“On average their third round pick will have a 25 per cent chance of playing 200-plus NHL games,” draft expert Shane Malloy said. “The fourth to seventh rounders have less than a 12 per cent chance. Not to sound negative, it’s just the historical probability.”
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And that means the task of picking in the latter stages of the draft fit into a pretty standard maxim: all prospects are bad.
This is not far from the truth about free agent contracts that Lou Lamoriello was heard to exclaim more than once: every contract is a year too long and a million too much.
That is, nothing in hockey, or sport for that matter, is as it should be.
Most players picked in the draft don’t make it. That doesn’t mean they’re bad players — there wouldn’t be a closet industry of draft-watchers if there wasn’t any fun in watching young kids try to figure out the world’s fastest team sport — it just means the odds are against them. There are only 700-or-so jobs in the NHL and only a few of those spots open up every year.
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So if you’re going to take stab at picking a player who probably isn’t going to make it but, maybe, just maybe, might, you do need to focus in on what the player can do and whether it’s reasonable to think you can add what they don’t have but will need to make it as an NHLer.
And in four of the five picks, it’s clear what the Canucks think. They went for players that either think the game well or have excellent skating already.
Elite Prospects editor-in-chief notes that in their prospect grading system, the kinds of players you’re finding are C-grade players. There’s a lot missing in their games, even if the top-line elements intrigue.
“Melvin Fernström didn’t find a spot on our board, but his dual-threat scoring ability, supporting skills, and production were such that we assigned him a C-grade, meaning we still rated him as about third-round talent,” J.D. Burke noted about the player Vancouver selected 93rd overall.
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He can score — he was a top scorer in the Swedish junior league — and he’s good at finding space off the puck, but he needs to improve his skating and his overall puck battle skills.
The next two picks were another pair of top-line standouts who have work to do: one of the top-scoring rookies in the Ontario Hockey League (Riley Pattersson, 125th overall) and then the OHL’s leading goal scorer (Anthony Romani, 162nd overall).
“They got Riley Patterson and Anthony Romani much higher than they were on our final board, and each has a well-defined offensive identity and a commendable statistical profile; Patterson as a north-south rush creator and Romani as more of a triple-threat scorer, most effective during sustained pressure,” Burke noted.
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The Canuck’s fourth pick, 189th overall, was an intriguing B.C. kid, Port Moody’s Parker Alcos, a lanky defender from the Edmonton Oil Kings.
“We ranked Alcos 93rd overall because of his size, mobility, and good tracking data that accounts for things like transition plays, passing, defensive plays, etc,” Burke explained.
The Canucks’ final pick, one of the last of the draft, 221st overall, was a very odd one though. The chance of a seventh rounder even playing an NHL game is very, very small, so small that there’s a strong case that the draft should be shortened in length.
The final pick by Vancouver was big Swiss defenceman Basile Sanssonens, who physically looks like an NHL player — but he has no offensive game to speak of and even the hard-edged defensive players in the NHL were productive players in junior. Sanssonens, on the other hand, scored just one goal in the Swiss junior league last season, a league not exactly known for churning out NHLers.
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But other than that last pick, there were intriguing signs of the influence of the Canucks’ small but hard-working analytics staff.
“They seemed to covet the players that shine in most analytic draft models, which hasn’t been the case at all in the last two or three drafts,” Burke noted. “We know Ryan Biech is pretty embedded on the amateur side, and you have to wonder if his influence at the draft table hasn’t expanded with time.”
pjohnston@postmedia.com
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Courtesy : https://theprovince.com/sports/hockey/nhl/vancouver-canucks/nhl-draft-2024-canucks