1839 words and some graphs (x2 draft media bonus)

Since we have a fresh new class of SHL draftees, and there’s one more day of double media bonus, I figured this was a great time to throw a bunch of graphs at everyone like I usually do. A lot of the graphs are similar to my pre-draft analysis that I submitted, with a few differences. Primarily being that everyone is drafted into the SHL now, so we can calculate how many draft picks players jumped/fell from their J draft. This time, the TPE that’s listed for players is their post-draft TPE, which I went through Sunday night through Monday morning at about 8:00 am EST to record. Side note, I hope I can continue to make enough money to never have to be an updater, because my god some of you have terrible update threads. A lot of players hadn’t updated the new TPE they can get after drafted, like training camp, coaching, and new training, so the TPE for some players may be outdated in a few days and the graphs skewed. So I apologize if you see the TPE for your player listed as something it’s not, it’s either because I updated you too earlier, or I misread your terrible update page. But I decided to use the newer TPE anyways, because the TPE tracker is 50-100 TPE outdated as of now, and to be honest if a player is truly elite they should be updating new TPE the second it’s available. As one last note, these graphs don’t include the Meszaros or Eller picks who had to go to their respected teams, and certain graphs that are about draft jumpers/fallers don’t include player who weren’t picked in the corresponding SMJHL draft. Scratch that, Ace wanted to see where he was on the graphs, so I edited it them to include those 2. However, I only edited those two into the figures in this write up, and did not edit the interactive graphs or my written analysis, too much work and not worth. And like before, I’ve included the interactive graph links that go with each of these plots. For those who haven’t seem them before, if you follow the link to the interactive graph, you can hover your mouse over the data and it will tell you who the player is, and the exact value of their TPE/draft pick/whatever the data is representing. So without any more rambling, let’s get to the graphs.
 


 
Draft Order: (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/19/#/)

(Seriously though, check out the linked graphs on the webpage, and hover your mouse over data points to see more info)




This first graph is pretty simple, just shows a column for every pick in the SHL entry draft, colored by position. This was a pretty deep draft for defenseman, with 7 of us going in the first round, specifically the first 13 picks. It looks like if you didn’t grab a defenseman early, or trade up to get one (shout out Manhattan), you were most likely out of luck in grabbing a future anchor for your blue line, as the rest of the draft was dominated by the forwards. Not too many goalies were available for teams (again not including Eller), with the highest goalie Huuveri being a relatively early second round pick, and the other two  falling in the late 2nd/early 3rd. Nothing too much more exciting to see with this graph, with most teams still drafting players until the 4th round, when most teams started to pass at that point.


 
Draft jumpers by position: (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/21/#/)
                                                (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/23/#/)
 
                              



These next two graphs show players ranked by their draft jump/fall status, compared to the previous SMJHL draft. There are two graphs which show the same data in slightly different ways. The first is just a ranked-player list colored by position, and the second are all the players binned into their positions, with the Y axis being the draft difference value. To no one’s surprise, my Newfoundland teammate and player I’ve written about in the pre-draft, Minamino is the #1 draft jumper, gaining a staggering 45 positions from the 6th round all the way to pick #11. His TPE and bank account grind paid off, and was rewarded with the clout of being a mid-first rounder. Not to mention, his grind will pay off huge for our Berserkers, as we got insane value for a 6th round, in a draft where we were plagued by a good amount of now inactives. The player who fell the most from our SMJHL draft was Chris Cerullo, our previous #1 overall pick. Obviously, as the reining 1OA, there’s nowhere to go but down for him, but that doesn’t mean he should’ve fell as far down as 42 sports to #43 overall. In terms of the positional breakdown, goalies were by far the biggest draft jumpers, while defense and offense were overall pretty even, just with forwards having more players drafted obviously.
 
 



 
TPE by position: (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/25/#/)
                              (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/27/#/)

                              


These two graphs are in the exact same format as the last two, but displaying total post-draft TPE instead of the number of picks jumped/fallen. This is the first look into the player’s post-draft TPE, as well as your first opportunity to berate me for getting yours wrong. We can see that this was a very top-heavy draft for defenseman, which sheds some light on why almost half of the first 13 picks were defenseman, despite only making up 28% of the total players drafted. As I stated before, there weren’t really many goalies in this draft, and other than Eller (who is again not graphed here, sorry Ace), none of the goalies kept up as well as the forwards and defenseman in terms of TPE. Looking at the positional breakdown, the thing that jumps out most I think is the spread of the defenseman’s TPE. There seems to be an upper tier of 8 defenseman that are in the higher earning bracket, while the rest have fallen behind. You can see the same upper tier forming in the forward group, but they have a better gradual separation in the rest of the class. Shout out to Cuddles who is currently leading the class, and closely approaching 400 TPE.
 



TPE vs. Draft pick: (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/29/#/)

This graph is a simple scatter plot, that shows the TPE of players vs. where they were picked in the SHL entry draft. The color indicates the draft difference from the SMJHL draft, while the size of the dots represent the pre-draft TPE from the TPE tracker sheet, just in case I really messed up looking at post-draft TPE. There’s nothing too surprising about the trend: the higher TPE earners were taken with earlier picks. Right at the start of round 3 is where a little variation in TPE vs. draft pick starts, but for the most part it’s a pretty repeatable, robust trend between TPE and draft pick. Looking at the individual data points, it seems like the biggest “steal” a team got with draft pick vs. TPE, is Los Angeles with defenseman Michael Lee at pick 37. At 315 post-draft TPE, other players around his range were going around pick 24, but again, as more people update after the draft these numbers and trends could change in the coming week. I would say there was a single case of a team “reaching” for a player. This was a strong, top heavy draft class, and no one was really taken at a position that was earlier than they deserved.
 
 
 
  
SMJHL team representation: (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/31/#/)
                                                    (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/33/#/)

                              

These two graphs show the SMJHL teams, with each dot representing a player that was just drafted. The first graph, the y value represents post-draft TPE, while the second graph the y value displays the value of player picks (higher draft pick, better value obviously). The first thing that jumps out to me is to see how little representation Vancouver had in the draft compared to the other teams. With only two players drafted, they have less than half the amount of draftees as any other team (unless I made a mistake which is certainly possible). From our class, Hartmann is really trying to lead the team and drag them to success. Detroit had a ton of players selected, but they’ve lost their status as dominating the TPE of our class, although that’s most likely to change as everyone updates with the SHL stuff. They’re certainly still a leading team for now. Anaheim and Anchorage also stand out in the TPE graph, currently being the only teams without a newly drafted prospect over 325 TPE. In terms of which teams had the highest drafted players (second graph), the first team to stand out to me is Carolina. Between Cuddles and Wagner, two absolute stand out players in our class that both went top 5, they have a giant spread of pick value of players from their team, and were a very top heavy team for SHL draft representation. Detroit and Newfoundland had the most players selected in the first round with 3 each, but all three of Newfoundland’s picks were in the top 11, making them the most represented team in the early first round. This graph and the last one are pretty similar, since a lot of teams drafted close to TPE order, so it’s no surprise to see Anaheim and Anchorage with a fairly low spread of draft pick values from their team. Kelowna didn’t have many players picked, but have the highest average draft value by far, with the lowest draft pick from their team going 20th. In fact, that pick was Rocci Berni who fell more than most people expected, so Kelowna could have had an even higher average draft representation. Lastly, despite having the same amount of first rounders as Newfoundland, Detroit really stole the draft in the second round, with 7 total players going in the first 2 rounds. With one final pick in the 3rd round, they have 8 total players getting drafted at some point in the entry draft, 2 more than the next highest team.
 



SHL team picks by TPE: (https://plot.ly/~smalinowski7/35/#/)


Typically what happens with my media, is that after all the time it takes to collect and format data, make and save graphs, and type everything up, I get really lazy with my graphs and write-ups by the last few graphs. Which is why I didn’t take the time to format the SHL data points with their corresponding team colors, so we’ll just have to deal with the default rainbow scheme. I hate it too. But this final graph shows all the players that each SHL team took, and their post-draft, most likely outdated by the time I write this, TPE. From first glance, I think that Tampa bay will be really happy with their draft. With 4 players already over 300 TPE, they had the most top heavy draft class from all the SHL teams. Texas should also be thrilled with their results, as they only had 3 picks and hit on all of them, with pretty much all of them at or above 300 TPE, and I think this will increase as some of the picks hadn’t updated TPE. Buffalo of course did well in terms of drafted TPE value as well, but that’s a little easier to manage with 2 top 7 picks, and an additional one at 18 as well. But the real winner of this draft is clearly Manhattan, because how many other teams drafted 350+ TPE players making SHL graphs on a Monday morning?