Justin’s NHL Draftbook (2014)

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.