NHL Draft Hits and Misses - New York Rangers

With this weekend’s upcoming draft in mind, I have been and will continue to look at each team in the NHL, and see how they have performed at the NHL draft over the past 15 years. There are basically 3 really important areas to determine the level of success at one of the most inexact sciences in the game – selecting 17 and 18 year old kids and projecting what they will be like over the next 10 or 15 years.

Those three areas are: 1) Success in the first round; 2) Success in the second round and 3) The number of drafted players playing on a team’s roster. I limit it to the first 2 rounds because that is where a majority of the impact players come from, and also where mistakes in judgement are magnified. Players that come after the second round for the most part are fortunate picks and if they work out it is a bonus. Henrik Zetterberg, for example, was a 7th round pick, and although you could claim Detroit was skilled in unearthing a prospect at that point in the draft, if they had known he was going to be as good as he turned out to be, they wouldn’t have waited that long. There is as much good luck as good management for a player like that, and that is factored in in the 3rd area of success.

Now we turn our attention to the New York Rangers, and their track record since the year 2000.

FIRST ROUND SUCCESS:

The Rangers have selected 12 players in the first round of the draft, with 5 of them making some impact in the NHL, for a success rate of 42%.

SECOND ROUND SUCCESS:

In the second round, 4 of the 16 players they selected have gone on to play a significant amount of time, resulting in a 25% success rate.

HOME-DRAFTED TALENT:

The Rangers had 8 NYR-drafted players play games with them this past season.

SUCCESSES – The Rangers have drafted Marc Staal, Chris Kreider, Michael Del Zotto with first round picks.,

FAILURES – New York also has the likes of Hugh Jessiman (12th overall in 2003) Al Montoya (6th in 2004) and Bobby Sanguinetti 18th on 2006). They also had some bad luck with the death of prospect Alexei Cherepanov before he could get his career started and the injuries that cut Dan Blackburn‘s career short.

STEALS – Henrik Lundqvist was the 200th pick on 2000, which would certainly count as a steal. Marek Zidlicky, Petr Prucha, Ryan Hollweg and Carl Hagelin were all 6th round or later picks, which is a pretty substantial list.