NHL General Manager Draft Ranks

Is there a good way to measure the success of General Managers at drafting players into the National Hockey League? Games Played alone can be a flawed statistic. Your results will tend to be skewed by what part of the draft order each GM has been making his picks. Steve Tambellini can look like a far better drafter than most because he's made more 1st overall picks than any of his counterparts. You have to be careful not to reward GMs who built bad teams, lost a lot of games, and made higher draft picks.

Players drafted by bad teams also have a better chance of making the team on his entry level contract, versus a perennial playoff team that has fewer roster openings. Some GMs believe in rushing prospects to the NHL, others believe in letting them mature in the minors. You can have two identical players drafted by different GMs at opposite ends of the rush/ripen philosophy spectrum who are equally good by age 23 but one has played twice as many NHL games. In this case one pick was not better than the other, but using only GPs one appears to be twice as good.

For my money, the best way to determine the value of the draft pick is the average annual salary of players after their entry level contracts. It's easy to estimate the expected future non-entry level average annual salary of each NHL Draft Pick, and it looks something like this.










For each individual player, we can estimate how much they are above or below the expected value of one drafted in that spot. Each season after a player is drafted, their value changes based on performance. How can we estimate changes in future value each season? Special thanks to the Hockey News annual NHL Future Watch magazine. I've got the complete set going back to 2006. The expected future non-EL salary of a player ranked #1 in FW is just under $5M. The 75th ranked is just under $1M. And so on and so forth. For players on entry level contracts I estimate their future value, after that their current AAV salary is their value. Since some of them are still active, I used their most recent value up to the age of 26.

Now that I've explained the method, it's time to ask how much the draft picks of each NHL General Manager have exceeded or missed expected value from 2005 to 2013. Salary data is current to the end of 2015/16 (I'll update my spreadsheet with this current season's stats when it's finally over at the end of June). The ranks are based on total sum of value minus expected value, divided by the number of draft picks. Only GMs who made at least 20 draft picks are included. Note that goalies and players drafted over the age of 20 are not included in these numbers.

RANK	NHL GM	Picks	Beat E[V]
1	Bob Gainey	32	$329,606
2	Bryan Murray	44	$310,132
3	Doug Armstrong	35	$222,242
4	Stan Bowman	32	$177,876
5	Doug Wilson	54	$166,135
6	Glen Sather	54	$135,372
7	Bob Murray	32	$134,440
8	Chuck Fletcher	29	$119,829
9	Jim Rutherford	53	$105,635
10	George McPhee	59	$96,289
11	Peter Chiarelli	45	$82,148
12	Greg Sherman	28	$78,067
13	Ken Holland	60	$71,674
14	Larry Pleau	45	$67,508
15	Steve Yzerman	25	$65,709
16	Kevin Lowe	23	$61,948
17	David Poile	61	$56,905
18	Scott Howson	44	$34,302
19	Darcy Regier	63	$27,302
20	Garth Snow	47	$13,833
21	Dean Lombardi	56	-$14,684
22	Paul Holmgren	36	-$30,471
23	Lou Lamoriello	56	-$59,207
24	Jay Feaster	44	-$59,315
25	Dale Tallon	74	-$66,599
26	Darryl Sutter	36	-$97,265
27	Joe Nieuwendyk	23	-$106,095
28	Mike Gillis	33	-$115,834
29	Don Waddell	32	-$121,930
30	Ray Shero	44	-$128,280
31	Dave Nonis	20	-$130,546
32	Don Maloney	40	-$149,085
33	Brian Burke	53	-$202,028
34	Steve Tambelini	30	-$206,954
35	Doug Risebrough	21	-$216,004