Under Valued 2022 NHL Draft Prospects

If you follow me on Twitter you have probably seen a few of my posts about prospect statistics which predict NHL success independent of draft position. For this post NHL success is defined as career Goals Above Replacement in the 7 years after the draft. Today, I am going to take these findings and apply them to the 2022 NHL draft and its prospects to find possibly under and over valued prospects. I have no idea what to expect, but I want to put something out publicly like this I can look back on in a few years. Who knows, maybe my model will nail a few of the players. 

Note. These are NOT draft rankings. If the output shows a player likely to be over valued and he goes say third overall, he is still likely to have a better NHL career than an undervalued player taken at 25. These are the players who are most likely to be under/ over valued relative to their draft position, not a substitution for the rankings themselves. Also, note I am only looking at the top 32 prospects in Elite Prospects May rankings today. Finally, note that I will publish the formula in full at some point this summer when I finish my paper, but NHLe is an input. The points data came from Elite Prospects, but Bacon's NHLe translations were used. Let's look at the prospects

Under and Over Valued NHL Draft Prospects

Let's take a look at which of these potential first round picks are likely to be over and under valued. First, let's look at the forwards. The values will be presented as Z scores to make them easier to interpret, the higher a prospect's Z score the more under valued they are likely to be relative to their draft position.

So I have never really cared about prospects enough to have "a guy" before, but apparently, that player should be Joakim Kemell. Kemell is a 5-foot 9 winger scoring at over half a point per game in a professional league (Liiga), while on the younger half of the top 32 prospects. He completely jumps off the page as the prospect my model expects to be the best in the class relative to his draft position. All aboard the Joakim Kemell hype train, somebody who I have never actually watched before but am now invested in.

Johnathan Lekkerimaki and Matthew Savoie are the next two, both are high-scoring shorter players. Savoie specifically I have heard a lot of prospect people rave about so I take that as a good sign. Also, note Shane Wright looks fine here despite how underwhelming everyone discusses him as. His expected output is going to be a lot higher than most of these guys because he will likely be the first overall pick, but his statistics aren't an incredibly big red flag IMO, even if they aren't other worldly. 

On the flip side is the prospects my model does not "like" and are more likely to underperform their draft position. Nathan Gaucher jumps out as the biggest red flag of all the 1st rounders by these rankings. Maybe he will have a great career but he certainly does not look like a first-round pick statistically. 

The other two more likely to be controversial are Juraj Slafkovský and Brad Lambert's positions as the next two most likely to underperform their draft position. The pushback is guaranteed to be that they play in a pro league suppressing their statistics and my or any other statistic model is "wrong" about them. I assume this is true but the simple fact of the matter is that prospects who have statistical profiles like these guys tend not to live up to their draft positions.

Now it's time for the defensemen. 

The first thing you will notice is all the defenders have negative values. At least a couple of these guys will probably outperform their draft position but the simple fact is defenders taken in the first round have a relatively poor track record of living up to their draft status, even holding scoring constant which is crazy given defenders tend to score a lot fewer points. Perhaps this is the timeline I'm using to define success, but defenders generally produce far less GAR than forwards, so it probably doesn't matter as much as you might think.

But the name who my model picks as the most likely to outperform his draft status is Simon Nemec. Apparently, Nemec and Kemell are prospects I should cheer for from the 2022 class.

I do believe the most valuable use of hockey analytics is to avoid very bad decisions above all else, and the model has a handful of defenders that may be that. I know this is crude but Owen Pickering is the largest red flag in the class. Elite Prospects has him 15th ranked, but statistically, his best feature is that he is tall. He's probably good defensively or something too but again, prospects who look like him tend to do worse than their draft position suggests they should. Maybe his height will allow him to do great things but he is the biggest red flag in the class using my model. 

This is my first attempt at using my model out of a sample. Maybe it will suck, or maybe we will look back in 5 years and say maybe I am on to something because Kemell should have gone higher, who knows. If you are a part of the scouting community I would love to hear from you on these outputs, you can dm me @CMHockey66. 

Now it's time for the defensemen.