Draft Ranking Tracker

It’s too early to talk about the draft. Yeah. That’s fair. I get that for most of you the interest isn’t there, and with the Leafs being good now, you’re probably content to learn about who the Leafs drafted after it happened. This post probably isn’t for you. For those of you want to start looking at who might be available to the Leafs when they pick somewhere in the 20-31 range next June, this is for you. For the fans of other teams who stumbled across this post, welcome. This is also for you lottery team folk’s. The only people this isn’t for is Ottawa Senators fans. Sorry. Your team is too broken.

Anyway, what I’ve put together is a very simple consolidated draft ranking tracker on Tableau. I just learned how to use Tableau, so it’s not going to be as fancy as the dashboards you see from the likes of others, but the hope is that it evolves into a more appealing tool over the course of the season as well. What it is right now is a way of looking at the overall rankings from Future Considerations, Hockey Prospect, ISS, TSN, Sportsnet, The Athletic, and likely others in the near future.

A few things to take away from this, is that I’ve also included some scoring statistics into this as well. All of the league adjusted NHL equivalency numbers are there, along with points per game. When you hover over a player’s dot on the left, you’ll get the bio of the player, and their rankings split out by scouting outlet (minus The Athletic. While their numbers are used in the Consolidated rankings, I’ll begrudgingly respect their paywall.)

The plan is to update this on at least a monthly basis going forward, and you damn well better believe that month to month changes will be reflected in this to some extent.

In the minds of the experts, no one is taking making this anything other than the Jack Hughes draft…yet. He was unanimously the #1 guy, but it will be interesting to see how Kaapo Kakko can make it interesting.

Kirby Dach, Dylan Cozens, Peyton Krebs and Ryan Suzuki have all put up early numbers to justify their strong draft standing, but for a team like the Leafs that will be picking later, Arthur Kaliyev might be a player worth familiarizing yourself with sooner rather than later.

On the defensive front this looks to be Bowen Byram’s show, but from a Leafs perspective, the player to start falling in love with might be Anttoni Honka.

Yeah, for most people that’s probably true, especially on a Leafs blog with when the draft is not nearly as important as it used to be. Though with the CHL Canada/Russia series coming up, and with the World Juniors shortly after that, we will start talking prospects a lot more and I assure it is just as much fun becoming overly invested in the 20-31 range of players as it is with the top group. The least you should be taking away from this is that Ottawa will be giving Colorado a very good player and that’s hilarious.

Like I said, I’m new to trying to use Tableau, and while I’m beginning to build things that I think are useful, I curious what people think could help make it more useful. Feel free to tell me what you’d like to see in the next updates.