Preparing for the NHL 2024 Draft: Final Analysis
In this Edition
- Draft 2024 Prospect Newsletter Series Recap
- Top Prospects Analysis
- Prospect to Team Mapping
- Presenting Your Recommendations
- Series Summary
Draft 2024 Prospect Newsletter Series Recap
This is the final newsletter in our six-week series on Preparing for the NHL 2024 Draft. Here's a quick recap of what we've covered so far.
- Week 1 Edition: Introduction to the six-week series.
- Week 2 Edition: Overview of data discovery process against NHL team data.
- Week 3 Edition: Analyzing the NHL teams for strengths and weaknesses across offense, defense and goaltending.
- Week 4 Edition: Analyzing a broad sample of the NHL 2024 Draft prospects.
- Week 5 Edition: Analyzing the top 50 NHL 2024 Draft prospects.
In this final newsletter, we'll:
- Summarize our top prospects by position (forwards, defense and goaltenders);
- Review the composite Offense, Defense and Goaltending scores for each NHL team;
- Map the top prospects to a sample of NHL teams; and
- Walk through a mock presentation for your recommendations.
We'll close with links to the datasets and tools we created within the six-week series so you can continue to explore the NHL 2024 Draft Prospects on your own time.
Top Prospects Analysis
In our Week 5 edition, we conducted an Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on the top 50 prospects. While an analysis is all fine and well, this week we'll rank the top prospects and align them to a sample of teams across offense, defense and goaltending.
We'll evaluate forwards, defense and then goaltending.
Forwards by Points Percentage
For incoming prospects, we used a combination of data from Elite Prospects (EP) and our own calculated statistics. We then ranked the top 50 prospects by Points Percentage (to represent point production) and EP's draft grouping.
The view below includes the following data for each of the top-ranked forwards: Nationality (NATIONALITY), Player Name (PLAYER), EP Draft Grouping (EP_GROUPING), and Points Percentage (PTS_PCT). The default view is sorted by Points Percentage and EP Grouping, but click the headers to sort on other columns.
We've also included a screenshot of our Excel heatmap. Here, you can see more information about each of the top prospects, for example, their Height (HT), Weight (WT), Games Played (GP), and so on.
Remember that we're only ranking these players on the available raw stats and our calculated metrics, so be sure to use other resources (such as the EP NHL 2024 Draft Guide) to explore the additional ratings, assessments and scouting commentary around each player. For example, below is the top prospects (who play forward) from the EP guide.
- Macklin Celebrini (C)
- Ivan Demidov (RW)
- Cayden Lindstrom (C)
- Tij Iginla (LW)
- Berkly Catton (C)
- Beckett Sennecke (RW)
- Konsta Helenius (C)
- Cole Eiserman (LW)
- Trevor Connelly (LW)
- Liam Greentree (LW)
Let's look at our top-ranked defense.
Defense by Defensive Percentage
Defense was tougher to rank solely based on statistics because of the lack of defensive statistics. For example, we'd look at Blocked Shots, Hits, Penalty Kill Percentage, and so on as core metrics to evaluate defensemen in the NHL. So, for our ranking we created and used a composite metric called DEFENSE. We used Assists per Game (APG) and PIM per Game (PIMPG) as two constituent statistics – not optimal, but based on the available statistics vaguely representative of 1) a defensemen's ability to move the puck up the ice and make plays and 2) their physical game.
The view below includes the following data for each of the top-ranked defensemen: Nationality (NATIONALITY), Player Name (PLAYER), EP Draft Grouping (EP_GROUPING_, and the composite Defense metric (DEFENSE). The default view is sorted by Defense and EP Grouping, but you can click the headers to sort on other columns.
And here again, we've included a screenshot of our Excel heatmap. Here you can see more information about each of the top prospects, for example, their Height (HT), Weight (WT), Games Played (GP), and so on. Note that we've filtered the DEFENSE metric on greater than 20%.
Below are the top prospects (who play defense) from EP's NHL 2024 Draft Guide.
- Artyom Levshunov (D)
- Zayne Parekh (D)
- Zeev Buium (D)
- Sam Dickinson (D)
- Anton Silayev (D)
- Carter Yakemchuk (D)
- Stian Solberg (D)
- Charlie Elick (D)
- Harrison Brunicke (D)
- Adam Jiříček (D)
Let's lastly look at the top-ranked goaltenders.
Goaltending
Goalies were not ranked within the top 50 prospects list, but there are several goalies included within the broader prospects dataset. Further, Goals Against Average (GAA) and Save Percentage (SAVE_PCT) were included as statistics so we have a good way to evaluate the incoming goalies. So, we filtered the view by goalies and then ranked them by Save Percentage.
The view below includes the following data for each of the top-ranked defensemen: Nationality (NATIONALITY), Player Name (PLAYER), Games Played (GP), and Save Percentage (SAVE_PCT). The default view is sorted by Save Percentage, but you can click the headers to sort on other columns.
And finally, we've also included a screenshot of our Excel heatmap. Here you can see more information about each of the top prospect goaltenders, for example, their Height (HT) and GAA.
As you prepare for the NHL Draft 24, be sure to both settle on a ranked list across the offense, defense and goaltending prospects and understand the commentary and ratings of the scouting reports within the EP Guide. If you only look at numbers alone, you could miss significant nuances buried in the commentary.
In the next section, we'll revisit the overall defense, offense and goaltending scores we assigned to the NHL teams and map the top five teams with the most need in those categories with a potential prospect.
Team Analysis & Prospect Mapping
In Week 3 of this series, we conducted an analysis of the NHL teams across multiple seasons. We also introduced composite metrics for Offense, Defense and Goaltending. Below, you can see we've created a view with each of these metrics, along with the Average score across them. And lastly, we've also included the First Round draft order. You can sort the columns by clicking the column headings.
When you sort lowest to highest on Defense, Offense or Goaltending, you can see where teams are weak across these areas. For example, the table below shows five teams that rank lower within the Offense metric, their order in the first round draft pick, and the potential prospect that we might pick if we were these teams.
We get a slightly different view for the Defense metric. Here, we've identified a sample from the worst-performing teams according to our metric are listed in the Team column and ranked by their first round order. Here, we've assigned potential picks based on the first round – even though the first round will likely favor prospects who play forward.
And finally, we have the Goaltending metric, where we've again taken a sample from the worst-ranking teams according to our composite metric, ranked by their first round draft order, along with the potential picks for these teams. Again, it's likely that these teams will not go for a goalie in the first round; rather, they likely focus on forwards – e.g., Tij Iginla for Calgary.
We're starting to see more coverage around mock drafts, so it'll be exciting to see which teams pick up the incoming studs. We follow The Hockey Guy, and here's his mock draft of the first round: THG's 2024 Mock Draft.
Presenting Your Recommendations
It's one thing making your selections, yet it's altogether something else presenting your findings and recommendations. So, in this final section we'll walk through a mock presentation on how we (as data analysts and data storytellers) might tell the story to recommend certain picks. We'll do this by choosing one team and representing our decisions for that team.
When we generally present a recommendation, we try to keep ourselves to no more than three core topics, which cover the following ground:
- Problem
- Opportunity
- Recommendation
You may have some additional content around the above, but for this mock presentation we'll keep it tight and to three slides. We'll choose San Jose Sharks because 1) they ended up last in the league overall in the 2023-2024 season and 2) they have two picks in the first round.
Problem
San Jose is a team that is building, so this is an important draft year for them. Our first task is to quantify the problem. So, in the slide below, we explore San Jose's issues through two lens: 1) by comparing their stats to a team that ended the season in the top ten (Boston) and 2) by calculating the difference in the team's average stats to those of the league. The slide below is a bit busy, so you may want to build it out top to bottom or clean it up a bit (e.g., fewer words, better color contrasts on the top chart, etc.).
The key part of the story here is that San Jose needs help across the board, so the solution would need to be multi-fold.
Opportunity
Arguably, this is a multi-year build so the question becomes what should you do this year to start the build? To answer this, we'd want to highlight areas of strength that San Jose might use as a platform to grow and scale the team. For example, when we explored the 2023-2024 Regular Season player data, we saw some potential opportunity areas on offense and defense; that is, several players were achieving above the league averages.
Now we can't forget goaltending, so we've added some key statistics from 2023-2024. (Note we only included goalies who played more than five games.) Here, you can see the story gets a bit more bleak; all goalies are below the league average for Save Percent and GAA. We again compare San Joe to Boston as a statistical contrast.
So, in short:
- There appears to be some potential in the offensive and defensive ranks; perhaps a "scale" opportunity. So, build and extend on the talent that you have.
- The goaltending situation, though, seems more dire. When teams don't have decent goaltending, it impacts the entire team – from winning all the way to feeling demoralized that their hard work doesn't net out in team wins. This is a situation that will require investing in a replacement goaltender.
Let's now move on to our recommendation.
Recommendation
You've already seen the Draft 24 prospects and the first round draft order, and now we've given you a very high-level view of the state of the San Jose Sharks. So, simply put our recommendation would be as follows:
- For the 1st pick in the first round, draft Macklin Celebrini. He's a player that can make a franchise and in the process will augment San Jose's offensive strengths.
- For the 14th pick in the first round, draft a sizeable defenseman such as Carter Yakemchuk or Sam Dickinson. This will augment the Sharks' blue line – and in the process give both the forwards and defensemen new blood.
- When their next pick is available, draft a top-ranked goalie, such as Evan Gardner, Sebastian Gatto or Samuel St-Hilaire. All have put up decent numbers.
Our slide here would be simple with a high-level summary of our general recommendations along with specific picks that map to those general recommendations.
Now, in the real world there would be way more analysis going into the above. We'd be integrating other dimensions to consider such as salary cap, free agency, injuries, and so on. So, think of the main goal here as giving you some ways to quantify problem areas, connect them to opportunities and then get granular with your recommendation. The goal for the deck is to have a natural flow from the gravity of the problem (high level) to the recommended solution (specific).
You can also check out our quick-hit YouTube video below:
Series Summary
This was the final newsletter in a six-week series on the NHL 2024 Draft. In the series we:
- Introduced you to the series and our goals;
- Conducted data discovery and an EDA on multiple seasons worth of NHL team data;
- Conducted data discovery and an EDA on all NHL 2024 draft prospects;
- Analyzed the top 50 prospects with greater detail;
- Evaluated where teams were weak and strong;
- Mapped a sample of teams to potential prospects; and
- Mocked up how we might present our recommendations for one team.
We hope you got something out of the six newsletters, and if you want to explore the datasets and tools we created along the way, you can find them below.
- NHL Team Dataset (Multiple Seasons)
- NHL 2024 Draft Prospects Dataset
- NHL 2024 Draft Prospects Power BI Dashboard
- NHL 2024 Draft Prospects (Top 50 Prospects) Power BI Dashboard
We also referenced the following resources, which are great additions to the above as you prepare for the NHL 2024 Draft.
Best of luck in the upcoming draft!
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