Leafs take Filip Kral at 149th overall

The Leafs’ 5th pick at this year’s draft is Filip Kral of the Spokane Chiefs.

This is the 4th defenseman that the Leafs have added in the draft. The Czech defenseman has already seen time in the Czech men’s league with HC Kometa Brno in 2016-17. In 2017-18, similar to Sandin, he made a early season jump from his home league to the CHL. In this case, Kral came to the WHL for Spokane. Here are his stats from eliteprospects.com.

This chart shows a little comparison between Kral and the Leafs’ first round pick, Rasmus Sandin from Mitch Brown who tracked many CHL games to make this comparison tool possible.

You can see, as would be obvious, Kral wasn’t as effective as Sandin in most areas. It is encouraging to see his success in controlled entries and how often he is running controlled exits. The success rate is obviously disheartening, but possibly can be improved with age.

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