As some of you may know, last year I created and cleaned up a complete history of the NHL Entry Draft, from the original draft in 1963 in Montreal all the way up until 2013 in Philadelphia. I used this spreadsheet – what eventually became known as the ‘Draftbook’ – to study trends and track success in drafting. Mostly for fun, to be honest.
With the 2015 Draft set to take place later this month, I figured now is as good a time as any to update my Draftbook and include last year’s 2014 Draft in Sunrise.
This is long, long overdue, and I plan on updating it with the 2015 data set as soon as it’s available. In the meantime though, I figure it will give some of my fellow writers, statisticians and fans something fun to poke around in, and maybe help generate some cool content leading up to the 2015 Draft.
The 2014 Draftbook contains the following data – Year, Draft Round, Pick (Round), Pick (Overall), Name, Position, POB, Height, Weight, Amateur League and Amateur Team.
All of these columns can be sorted and filtered, allowing us to quickly get answers to questions like, “How many 6’3 centres have been drafted in the top 10 picks in the past 20 years?” or “How many players have the Toronto Maple Leafs drafted out of the OHL?”
The data set is not perfect, but it’s as close as we can get without many hours of researching old leagues and team names. Not saying that will never happen, but it won’t be happening today.
Some of the data has been changed – for example, for Amateur League data, all SWE and SHL and SWEDEN have simply been changed to ‘Sweden’. If it’s the Allsvenskan, it will read ‘Sweden D2’, and if it’s one of the Swedish junior leagues, it will read ‘Sweden Jr.’.
If you have any questions or comments, leave it in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter.
Cool.
I think it would be interesting to see the NHL Central Scouting rankings on the spreadsheet.
Maybe it’s just me wanting to see where some of the players end up drafted compared to their rank but it would be a cool feature to add.
Other than that thanks for compiling it.
How may 3-10 picks undersized forwards were busts?
It is an amazing amount of information that you have gathered. There are two columns that I would love to see added #1 if the draft position is traded to?from whom. #2 how many NHL games did the drafted players play.
Just another word of gratitude, Justin. An amazing service. Gracias.
So what happened to Rinat Valiev our second pick last year? All I can see is he played two games for the Marlies then disappeared.
Did he suddenly discover the comforts of Stolichnaya Vodka?
Uh, no.
Valiev played a full season for Kootenay of the WHL. Put up 46 points in 52 games. He also represented Russia at the WJCs. He played two games for the Marlies at the very end of the season, after Kootenay was booted from the WHL playoffs.