NHL Draft Hits And Misses - Arizona Coyotes

With this past weekend’s 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 former Phoenix, now Arizona Coyotes, and their track record since the year 2000.

FIRST ROUND SUCCESS:

The Coyotes have selected 18 players in the first round of the draft, with 10 of them making some impact in the NHL, for a success rate of 56%.

SECOND ROUND SUCCESS:

In the second round, none of the 17 players they selected have gone on to play a significant amount of time, resulting in a 0% success rate.

HOME-DRAFTED TALENT:

The Coyotes had 13 Phoenix-drafted players play games with them this past season.

SUCCESSES – The Coyotes had a nice string of 6 straight years with their first round picks panning out. Starting in 2004 the Coyotes drafted Blake Wheeler, Martin Hanzal, Peter Mueller, Kyle Turris, Mikkel Boedker and Oliver Ekman-Larsson

FAILURES – Jakub Koreis was the Coyotes first round pick in 2002 and never played an NHL game, the only such whiff in the first round, but when it comes to the second round, the Coyotes haven’t had any success whatsoever.

STEALS – The Coyotes found Daniel Winnik with the 265th pick in the 9th round of the 2004 entry draft, really the only late round success for the franchise.