What Difference Does it Make?

I wanted to use a lyric from Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast (6th round and all that) in the title of this post, but I just couldn't put my finger on the right one so The Smiths will have to do (amazingly, only two years separate those tracks).

And now a here's a heckuva lot of text for a near meaningless trade (only in Toronto would a sixth rounder for a marginal 37 year old be seen as some type of bell weather for the franchise; I should note, the traded asset is also conditional. Yeah, it's Brad May for a conditional sixth round pick. Now, Lord knows what the conditions are, but I'm guessing none of the dedicated media horde will be able to fill us in on that lovely detail either.)

Thanks to the entry draft database at Hockeydb, I was able to very quickly do a cut and paste job to look at 6th round draft picks from 1989 to 2004. There was no real method to selecting that particular stretch of dates. I wanted to get a large sample size (429 players) I didn't want to get too close to the present as some players taken that late may still yet make the NHL, or have made it but haven't logged enough games to stand out. I also wanted to avoid the earlier 80s when teams took flyers on Eastern Europeans in the later rounds (like the Canucks taking Pavel Bure in the 6th round in 1989), but mostly I wanted to see if I could get a feel of just what the value of a sixth round pick is.

As I was doing this entry and the attendant math between cleaning up from dinner and getting the kids to bed (while also desperately laundering my hockey gear for my Wednesday night game after forgetting to air out after playing pick-up on Saturday) I didn't take the time to do any sort of round by round comparison, but if anyone else has that data or link to it, by all means post it in the comments.

Here's what I found:

Anyone looking to dump on the Leafs for trading a sixth round pick for a broken down Brad May has about 14 big names to chose from to make their case as only 14 players (or 3.26% of the 429 I looked at) have managed to play in 500+ games, including the likes of Pavel Bure, Daniel Alfredsson, Darcy Tucker, Dallas Drake and Craig Conroy; I'll toss Pavel Datsyuk into that mix (400+ games) as well as Andrei Markov as he's a dreaded Hab (I'll also give even odds that one or more of those names will be in Damien Cox's next column).

On a points per game basis (unfair to those D-men, I know) only three players: Bure, Datsyuk and Alfredsson are over the 0.80 mark (that's 0.7% of the 429 players drafted for those of you keeping score). In the next tier down, only the recently waived Jussi Jokinen is better than 0.60 pts/gm and only 10 players out of 429 hit the 0.5 pts/game mark (excluding Rick Wallin who played 19 games with the Minnesota Wild and Dan Lambert who had a cup of coffee with the Nordiques, playing 29 games over two seasons in the early 90s).

In terms of total games played (note: I'm not double counting here, so it's guys that played 500+; or 400-499; or 300-399; etc.) there's not a lot to choose from. With 429 players to choose from, nearly 70% never played a single game in the NHL. Here's how that breaks down:

500+ 3.26%
400+ 2.8%
300+ 3.26%
200+ 2.56%
100+ 3.73%
1 to 99 15.62%
No Games 68.76%

In short: it's long odds that an impact player can be found as late as the sixth round. Sure, it happens and, like the lottery, you can' t win if you don't have a ticket, but half a dozen names out of 16 drafts isn't exactly inspiring.

Not that I'm being a Leaf apologist here either, Brad May doesn't exactly define inspirational either.