I was discussing hockey with a friend of mine, and an interesting point came up. Here is a chart of the top 10 scorers in the National Hockey League, and their draft position.
| Rank | Name | Draft Position |
| 1 | Alex Ovechkin | 1st Overall |
| 2 | Henrik Sedin | 2nd Overall |
| 3 | Sidney Crosby | 1st Overall |
| 4 | Nicklas Backstrom | 4th Overall |
| 5 | Joe Thornton | 1st Overall |
| 6 | Marian Gaborik | 3rd Overall |
| 7 | Dany Heatley | 2nd Overall |
| 8 | Patrick Marleau | 2nd Overall |
| 9 | Martin St. Louis | Undrafted |
| 10 | Brad Richards | 64th Overall |
| 11 | Patrick Kane | 1st Overall |
| 12 | Steven Stamkos | 1st Overall |
| 13 | Anze Kopitar | 11th Overall |
| 14 | Evengi Malkin | 2nd Overall |
| 15 | Ilya Kovalchuk | 1st Overall |
This is fascinating to me. The process of scouting, drafting, and developing NHL players has led to a near-monopoly of the league’s top scorers concentrated among the first few teams in the draft. Teams have been able to take 18 year-olds and correctly determine, for the most part, who will and won’t be a star.
I don’t think that I need to provide a graph to tell you that baseball’s situation was dramatically different. The top parts of every draft are filled with failure – look at Brad Lincoln, Luke Hochevar, Matt Bush, Delmon Young (yes, I’m labeling him a failure), Bryan Bullington. And it still gets harder for teams as you get further in the draft. And baseball teams get to wait for players to go through 2 or 3 college years if they want to draft someone. NHL teams draft at 18 almost exclusively.
This is why I oppose hard slotting systems for draft picks. In hockey, you can rank the top players pretty clearly. In baseball, almost all players are worth more to certain teams than they are to others. The Braves may so certain that they want a guy that they’ll take someone whom no one else will take for 20 picks. That player’s value will probably be below-slot.
I don’t have any answers for why the NHL draft is so easy for teams and why the MLB is unbelievably difficult. Hockey is a much more physical/athletic sport, which makes it easier to identify who will be successful. But at the same time, hockey is not football, and contains a lot of non-physical elements. Injuries have a lot to do with it too, as do the long haul of minor league development. I guess I don’t really have much of a point in mind, other than to stop and stare at the astounding differences between the two leagues.
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4 Responses to What Makes The Baseball Draft So Hard?
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TIQ IQ
I think out of the 4 major sports, the MLB draft is the ultimate crap-shoot. NFL second, NBA third and NHL last.
It’s the one sport imo, that you really don’t benefit from being horrible. Sure you get high end talent but compared to the other sports the “bust” rate is higher.
An NBA prospect- ex John Wall, who is predicted to be the first overall pick in this June NBA draft by everyone will be a great PG in the NBA.
How does everyone determine that? The basketball game is not difficult. It’s a much easier transition from college to pro.
Same with Hockey. For the most part the speed of the NHL is what most 18 and 19 y/o hockey players just need to get used to. After that their great skills can just take over. The bust rate is very low.
For amateur baseball prospects, you just don’t know whether an 18 y/o is going to be able to hit a ML change-up. Much harder to project.
Mental, Mental, Mental. You’ll never catch a hockey player wearing ladies underwear. Also, you never catch NHL talent doing the hockey equivalent of the following:
Forgetting how to throw from 2nd to 1st base (Knoblauch)
Swinging at pitches 2 ft off the plate over and over again (Soriano)
Having to give up pitching because of one bad result (Ankiel & Wohlers)
And that’s the pros…now imagine the 19 year old kids.
First, a disclaimer: I know nothing about hockey, and I care even less. Maybe someday, someone will educate me in its delights, but for now it is more or less a closed book to me.
However, I have a few observations:
1) Baseball players often mature quite late in their careers when compared to other athletes. It’s therefore difficult to predict with any certainty which ones are going to make the grade.
2) Baseball is a game of more nuances of skill than most. Golf and cricket are comparable. In all three sports, while it’s easy to spot someone who has raw talent, it’s notoriously difficult to pick a really top-class performer who is going to deliver the goods on a long-term basis. The mental aspect of the game is a factor here, too.
3) As you’ve already identified, there are way more variables at play in terms of what teams need – or rather, what they think they will need by the time the player graduates to the majors. The greater degree of positional specialization than is the case in most other sports, combined with idiosyncrasies of ballparks and so on, means that one team’s first pick would be another team’s makeweight.
Great topic, by the way.
Tim
In terms of the draft and player development, hockey is a much better comparison for baseball than either football or basketball. But still, comparing the two is still very much apples and oranges.
Firstly, the NHL has a global draft whereas MLB is restricted to the US and Puerto Rico. As a result, all the talent – and particularly all of the top talent – funnels to the NHL through the draft. If you’re going to make a comparison of the top NHL picks to their MLB counterparts, it’s not just the top draft picks you have to look at, but also the top international signees.
Secondly, while both sports have affiliated minor league systems, there is a big difference between them. MLB has a six tiered player development system. The NHL has two tiers. Further, the vast majority of players taken in the NHL draft are playing Major Junior hockey in Canada – which is essentially pro hockey – or playing in European pro leagues. At the time of the draft, hockey players are much further along their development arcs than even college players taken in the MLB draft. Comparatively speaking, it would be like allowing minor league prospects to complete high A, then have them drafted.
To further that point, consider how many top NHL draft picks proceed immediately to the NHL. That list above is strewn with guys who never spent a day in the AHL. It’s almost unheard of for a Major League draftee to go straight to the Majors. Strasburg’s the biggest prospect to come along in years and even he’s starting out at AA. Dave Winfield and John Olreud are the only player who come to mind at present who went straight from the draft to MLB.
Draft rights and the draft set up are also entirely different in the NHL. All players who will be 18 as of September 15th in the draft year are eligible for that year’s draft. A player’s draft rights are retained by the drafting club even if the player doesn’t sign right away. That, coupled with a hard salary cap for entry level players, leaves the NHL immune to the type of signability issues that we see with the MLB draft. The NHL also doesn’t have to worry about weighing 18 year old high school seniors against 20 year old draft eligible sophomores against 22 year old college seniors, trying to project development for different aged players with different levels of experience while also trying to determine the risk of a player going to college or returning college rather than signing a pro contract.
Lastly, scouting for the NHL is entirely different. While each team employs its own amateur scouting staff, the League also maintains a Central Scouting Bureau. CSB scouts all amateur prospects extensively, maintains files and videos on them all, releases rankings twice a year, and hosts a draft showcase. Everything is more centralized. Different clubs may weigh their own scouting against CSB in different ways, but the point is there is a league backed scouting bureau that if nothing else serves as a valuable cross-checking resource. That, combined with the fact that most viable draft prospects are playing in well established Junior or European leagues makes the level of risk far less than when trying to evaluate a high school prospect who plays 18 games a year in some obscure rural league.