At Least They Tried: The Worst Players from Each Draft: Part 1, 2010-2014
Plenty of drafted players each year never play in the NHL.But some of the ones who do don't end up being great. Here's part 1 of the worst players to make the NHL from the last decade's drafts.
Every year hundreds of players go to the NHL Draft with the hopes of being selected by a team and getting a chance to prove themselves at the highest level in the hockey world. Some of them end up being incredible steals (I have a piece planned on steals coming soon), some of them have great potential, but never fulfill it, some end up never getting a chance in the NHL, and others get to play in the NHL but end up failing to make an impact at the NHL level. This particular article is about that last group: the players who got some chances to play in the biggest hockey league in the world, but didn’t end up having a noteworthy career. In fact, they ended up having a negative impact on their teams during their brief careers.
This article is a little bit different. This is the first of a two-part series looking at the worst players of each draft class from 2010 to 2018. This part will look at the drafts from 2010 to 2014, and the second part will look at the drafts from 2015 to 2018. In each piece, the player mentioned will be determined by Hockey-Reference’s Point Shares1 which is designed to try to estimate a player’s contributions to his respective team or teams over the course of a season (or in this case, their career up to this point) into one number that shows how many points that player “created” and also is a more accurate measure than points per game since points per game could be skewed if a player has only played a small number of games yet has scored a lot of points in those games. I used the same method to determine the biggest draft busts from 2015-2018 and used the same method to create the graphs used in the article, which is seen below:
“I then created a graph with Tableau showing every player from that draft that played at least 1 NHL game plotted by the overall pick the player was taken and their game score; the graphs will be shown underneath each profile and the respective player’s point on the graph will be indicated by a black circle.”
The important thing to mention here is that point shares, unlike win shares in baseball (which point shares are based off of), can be a negative value and indicates that a player is costing his team points by being out on the ice rather than contributing to his team’s points in the standings. Every player listed in both parts will have negative point share values, meaning that across their careers, these players were actively harming the teams that they were playing for.
One more thing before we get into the list: one important thing needs to be kept in mind when reading this: all of these players made the NHL when a hundred others from their draft classes never even got to play a game at that level, so while this is certainly not an article meant to praise their NHL performance, they do deserve a lot of credit for putting in the effort needed and earning an opportunity to play in the NHL in the first place. Every one of these players mattered; they got to play games at the highest level possible in the game of hockey and no matter how poorly they played in the NHL, nobody can ever take that away from them.
2010: Michael Chaput, C (89th Overall, Philadelphia Flyers): -1.4 PS
Michael Chaput’s NHL career is most notable for his brief stint with the Vancouver Canucks, where the team’s head coach at the time, Willie Desjardins, played him on the first line with the Sedin twins, which probably contributed to Chaput’s awful -1.4 point shares, considering that he was a terrible player for Vancouver. His best ever NHL season was when he scored 4 goals and 9 points in 2016-17. Chaput scored 0 goals in the final four seasons of his career and only managed 5 assists during that time span, all of which came during the 2018-19 season when he was with Montreal. Despite being drafted by Philadelphia, he never played a game for the Flyers as they traded him to Columbus in 2011, where he spent the first three seasons (2013-14 to 2015-16) of his NHL career before signing with Vancouver that summer, where he famously was given first line duty with the Sedins over Loui Eriksson, the big-name free agent signing for the Canucks that summer. Chaput then joined Montreal in 2018, who then traded him at the 2019 trade deadline to Arizona for another minor league caliber player, Jordan Weal. Chaput spent the last couple years off his NHL career in Arizona, last playing in the NHL in the 2020-21 season, after which he spent a season in the Pittsburgh Penguins organization before signing with Barys Astana of the KHL for this past season. Chaput’s NHL career finished with him playing 182 games and scoring 22 points, playing the vast majority of his career on the fourth line when in the NHL, often moving a lot between the NHL and AHL during his time in North America.
2011: Blake Pietila, LW (129th Overall, New Jersey Devils): -0.6 PS
I’ll be honest; I had no idea who Blake Pietila was before researching this piece, but from the 2011 Draft, his -0.6 point shares is the worst of any player who played NHL games from that class. Pietila never played more than 19 NHL games in a season, hitting that mark in 2018-19 and never recorded more than 2 points in the season, getting a goal and an assist in 7 games in the 2015-16 season, the same year he made his NHL debut. Pietila, who spent his entire professional career as a left winger, was a solid producer in college at Michigan Tech and at the AHL level with the Devils’ affiliates in Albany and Binghamton respectively. Pietila rarely got any playing time at the NHL level but was extremely underwhelming in the small amount of time that he got. He ended up playing only 38 games in his NHL career, all with the New Jersey Devils -the team that drafted him- managing a goal and 3 assists while averaging only about 12:47 of ice time per game. Pietila left the Devils organization after the 2018-19 season and never played in the NHL again, spending his next two seasons in the AHL with the San Diego Gulls and the Hershey Bears. Injuries limited him to only 6 games for the Bears in 2020-21 and led to him retiring from professional hockey at the age of 28.
2012: Stefan Matteau, LW (29th Overall, New Jersey Devils): -0.3 PS
In the 2012 Draft, there were actually three players with -0.3 point shares, so I used games played as the tiebreaker to determine which player to choose here. Stefan Matteau, a first round pick of the New Jersey Devils, played the most games of the three players with 92 games, so he earns the selection for this list from this class. Matteau was projected to be a solid power forward at the NHL level, but his game never really translated into an evolving NHL that got a lot faster and a lot more skillful. Matteau spent the vast majority of his time bouncing between the NHL and AHL, never playing more than 32 NHL games in a season, achieving this feat in 2015-16 when New Jersey traded him halfway through the season to Montreal in exchange for Devante Smith-Pelly. Matteau didn’t play in the NHL in the 2016-17 season, spending the entirety of the year with Montreal’s AHL affiliate, the St. John’s Ice Caps, before signing with the Vegas Golden Knights for their inaugural season, spending 8 games with them and getting an assist before ending up back in the AHL with the Chicago Wolves. Matteau’s career-best in points in a season was 3, a feat he achieved twice (2012-13 and 2019-20). After a 2018-19 season spent entirely in the AHL, he signed with Columbus and spent two years with the Blue Jackets, playing 27 games and getting 3 goals and an assist, before playing one last NHL game in 2021-22 with the Colorado Avalanche. Matteau left for Europe for the 2022-23 season, splitting the year between Linkopings HC of the Swedish league and Ingolstadt ERC in the German DEL. Matteau’s North American career concluded at the age of 27 with 92 games, 6 goals, 5 assists, 11 points, and 41 penalty minutes, a very disappointing career for a first round pick.
2013: Luke Johnson, C (134th Overall, Chicago Blackhawks): -1.0 PS
The Chicago Blackhawks’ 2013 Draft included several nice selections that ended up becoming NHL caliber players, including Ryan Hartman (30th overall), John Hayden (74th overall), and Tyler Motte (121st overall). Luke Johnson didn’t exactly achieve the heights of some of his counterparts from that Blackhawks draft class. Johnson had a decent pedigree before he was drafted thanks to some solid seasons with the USHL’s Lincoln Stars, but he had a pretty mediocre college career at the University of North Dakota and Johnson, despite being an intelligent player with some nice aggression, never really could develop into a well-rounded enough player to fill in a long-term role at the NHL level. Johnson played 15 games for the Blackhawks in 2018-19, his only season in the Chicago organization where he played NHL games, managing an assist and 8 penalty minutes. Johnson spent most of his time in the AHL, playing solid but unimpressive hockey for the Rockford IceHogs before signing with the Minnesota Wild in the summer of 2019. Johnson spent the next two years once again moving between the NHL and AHL levels, playing 17 games for Minnesota, getting a goal in the 2020-21 season; it is his only goal at the NHL level (as of the time of writing). That 2020-21 season is the last season where Johnson played NHL games, as he’s spent the next two seasons with the Manitoba Moose and San Jose Barracuda of the AHL. His career point shares of -1.0 is the worst in the draft class by a pretty wide margin (second worst is Jacob De La Rose with -0.4 point shares). There’s still a very small chance that the 28-year-old Johnson somehow finds a way to play more NHL games, but in all likelihood, his NHL career will finish with 32 games, 1 goal, 1 assist, 2 points, 13 penalty minutes, and -1.0 point shares.
2014: Christoffer Ehn, C (106th Overall, Detroit Red Wings): -1.0 PS
Chritoffer Ehn only played in the NHL for two seasons, but he still managed to play in 114 NHL games in that span for a truly terrible Detroit Red Wings team. He played for the Wings during their rebuilding seasons of 2018-19 (7th in the Atlantic Division) and 2019-20 (8th in the Atlantic Division). Ehn never really produced much with his SHL team, Frolunda, but the Red Wings needed young players to come and fill roster spots in those seasons, so their former 4th round pick from 2014 was conscripted to go fight in a hopeless battle. Ehn only ended up spending those two seasons in North America, putting up a gnarly -1.0 point shares in that time he was one of the worst players on one of the worst teams in the league. He did his level best, but only managed a paltry 5 goals and 8 assists during his two seasons in the Motor City, and his production in a brief stint with AHL Grand Rapids wasn’t much better (7 points in 17 games). After the disastrous 2019-20 campaign, where Ehn’s season point shares total was -0.9, he decided to end his brief North American odyssey and return home to Sweden, spending a year with Frolunda, the club he developed with, before moving on to Linkopings HC, where he’s played for the last two seasons, and where he just put up his best ever points total in his SHL career, with 21 points in 47 games in 2022-23. Ehn will likely spend the rest of his professional career in Sweden, and while he never became another Swedish phenom for the Red Wings on the level of Henrik Zetterberg or Nicklas Lidstrom, he at least can say that he played in over 100 NHL games, even if it was with a pretty dismal team during two dismal seasons.
This concludes Part 1 of my analysis of the worst players from each draft class in the last decade. Part 2 will be coming out some time in the near future, hopefully before the first round of the 2023 NHL Draft. Remember this: all these men got the chance to play in the NHL and they do deserve a level of respect for getting there, even if their careers ended up being far from successful. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series coming soon.
Click the link for a more in-depth explanation on Point Shares and how it is calculated by hockey-reference.com