Welcome back to the Thursday prospect ramblings where I can now continue my decade of drafting series. I was originally just going to look at players drafted out of the Russian leagues but there was only 90 in total from 2008-2018, so I added in the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Slovakia, Norway, Denmark and Belarus. I wanted to add Latvia but no one was drafted out of any Latvian leagues, sadness. Sweden and Finland are the biggest leagues so I left them out. Additionally, I usually go with a “success rate” percentage amount, but the rates here were abnormally high since quite a few players still play in leagues outside North America and very well could be signed to an NHL deal and play in the league. I will still provide my round by round success rate percentage at the end so you can see how optimistic I am.

Here is my #GoodTweet of the week

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Before I start just a reminder that all leagues identified in the regions I found are counted. I used hockeyreference.com’s draft pages and grabbed the regions from there. Fun fact, Auston Matthews counts for the Swiss because he was drafted out of there.

From 2008-2018:

• Russia had 90 players drafted and added 21 more in 2019
• Czech’s were next with 38 players drafted, with four more in 2019
• The Swiss produced 16 draft selections but had no one drafted in 2019
• Slovakia had seven players drafted and also none in 2019
• Germany had five players drafted, and had Moritz Seider drafted in 2019
• Three players were drafted from Denmark and Norway, with only Denmark having a playing drafted in 2019
• Belarus only had one player drafted

From all of the leagues there were 163 players drafted in total from 2008-2018, and an additional 27 drafted in 2019. Here is a chart of the total players drafted

Now here is the chart where the regions are in different colours!

Because I love charts here is a numbered chart that I used for the graphs

Not much to add here other than once 2014 hit there was a real emphasis to work on scouting outside North America. While not much of one, at least 10 additional players per year help. The added picks coming from Las Vegas in 2017, 2018 and 2019 may have also helped to increase the players picked.

The total players drafted per round are what next, you will notice on this chart that the first round has the least picks and later has many more picks. Likely why scouting overseas is so important as there are plenty of good players drafted in the later rounds.

Now if you add in the additional 2019 players drafted

With the chart larger you can see the players drafted per region. You will see that the added countries picked later in the draft with Russia, Czech Republic, and Switzerland predominately featured in the first three rounds (should out to Slovakia for having three players drafted in the second round).

Now for my success rate per round….

Why I did not want to include it for the article:

• The first two rounds have success rates of greater than 85%, round two is exceptionally high
• Round three and four with rates of 60.87% and 68.18% respectively, both are quite high
• Round five at 25.93%, the lowest success round
• Round six has a 37.5% success rate, continuing my trend of a randomly high sixth round
• 03% successful picks in round seven is quite outlandish

Analysis on those factors:

• The trend at least decreases per round
• The higher numbers may be because of more successful players drafted in a smaller sample size of players
• Round two could be higher as first-round talent players outside of North America usually can slip to the second round or later

Not much else I can add. Hopefully over the next two weeks Sweden and Finland will yield success rates that make more sense.

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