Interesting video Rudo.

I’m no expert in statistical analysis, but I wonder if using minutes played rather than games played would better account for the value of a drafted player. It’d certainly give much more value to defensemen and goalies than just total points does. Also probably irons out some noise resulting from injuries; let’s say player A plays 22 minutes a night but misses 6 games (22×76=1,672) while player B logs just 12 but plays all 82 (12×82=984.) It’s obviously not perfect: using total minutes played would still favor players drafted further back in time. You could potentially account for some of that by looking at each draft pick’s minutes played relative to their 1st round class. If you did that, your formula would be:

(player total minutes)/(total minutes of all players in that 1st round)

Let’s call it player minutes/total minutes (PM/TM.) Pamtam? Pomtom?

I think that would still be skewed towards older drafts; as games played increases, so too would a discrepancy in minutes played above or below the average. To try to account for that, one might rank each pick’s PM/TM within his class and use those rankings to grade each class.

You could also do PM – (TM/number of players drafted) to find a sort of PM above expected (PMAX.) If you wanted to go truly nuts in trying to balance newer drafts vs old, you could then try to extrapolate PMAX across an average career for a player with that many minutes/season.

Out of curiosity, I crunched the numbers for the 2013 class. Mackinnon’s Pamtam is 6.25% and his PMAX is 7,497 minutes, good for 3rd. 1st is Seth Jones (7.35% and 10,320 minutes) and 2nd is Ristolainen (6.34% and 7723 minutes.) Definitely not perfect. I guess being a defenseman on a bad team is the best way to max your PMAX.

Anyways, thanks for the vid!