At Least They Tried: The Worst Players from Each Draft: Part 2, 2015-2018
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 2 of the worst players to make the NHL from the last decade's drafts.
This is the second of a two-part series looking at the worst players from each draft class from 2010 to 2018. Part 1, which covers the drafts from 2010 to 2014, can be viewed here. In case any of you have not read part one and need an explanation, here is my explanation of point shares and how I made the graphs that you will see in each section:
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.
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.
“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.”
As I mentioned in part one, the important thing to keep in mind when reading about each of these players is that, unlike so many others from their respective draft classes, these guys played in the NHL. They earned an opportunity to play professional hockey at the highest level even if they were greatly ineffective during that time. They deserve a lot of credit for getting as far as they did and earning an NHL opportunity and even if their performance was poor, nobody and nothing can take away the fact that they got to play hockey at the highest level possible for any player. They lived out many people’s dreams simply by playing NHL games.
2015: Mitchell Stephens, C (33rd Overall, Tampa Bay Lightning): -0.6 PS
The Tampa Bay Lightning became known for finding incredible steals outside of the draft’s first round throughout the 2010’s. Mitchell Stephens, with a career point shares value of -0.6, isn’t one of those steals. The winger had a solid career with the OHL’s Saginaw Spirit that was far from dominant and spent multiple decent seasons with the Syracuse Crunch, Tampa’s AHL team, before making his NHL debut in the 2019-20 season, playing 38 regular season games and scoring 6 points (3 goals, 3 assists). The forward has his moments in that first season with Tampa Bay, where he played in 7 postseason games and even scored a playoff goal as Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup in the Toronto Bubble in 2020, but then spent the majority of the 2020-21 season on the taxi squad and never got a chance to play any postseason games as Tampa won their second consecutive cup. After only 7 games with Tampa Bay in that second NHL season, the Lightning traded Stephens to Detroit for a 6th round pick, where he was reunited with former Lightning GM Steve Yzerman. Stephens spent most of the 2021-22 season as a healthy scratch, playing only 27 games and managing no goals and 6 assists in the Motor City. Stephens then signed with the Montreal Canadiens on a one-year contract, spending the entirety of the 2022-23 season with Montreal’s AHL team, the Laval Rocket, where he scored 20 goals and 41 points. At 26 years of age, there’s still a small chance that Stephens will get more chances at the NHL level, especially if he stays with the rebuilding Canadiens, to add to his 72 career games, 13 points (3 goals, 10 assists), and to improve on his -0.6 career point shares over his three NHL seasons. Even if he doesn’t get another chance, Stephens will always have that 2020 Stanley Cup ring as a memento for his brief and unimpressive NHL career.
2016: Will Lockwood, RW (64th Overall, Vancouver Canucks): -0.9 PS
The 2016 Draft is likely one that the Vancouver Canucks organization, as well as the fan base, would probably rather forget. They ended up selecting one of the biggest busts in recent memory in defenseman Olli Juolevi, and they also ended up taking the worst player from the entire class in Will Lockwood, who has a gnarly -0.9 career point shares. Lockwood was seen as a fast, energetic winger who played with a good motor and high intensity, but didn’t really produce much offensively to be anything more than a bottom six forward. His four year career at the University of Michigan had some promise but was nothing to write home about but he completely flopped once he made his Canucks debut in the 2020-21 season, as he only played 2 games and failed to score. The next season, Lockwood played more games, 13 of them to be exact, and still failed to collect an NHL point. He played well for the Canucks’ AHL team in Abbotsford, but he wasn’t exactly seen as an up-and-coming prospect by this point as he was already 23, had only played in 15 games, and hadn’t scored a point yet. He finally got his first point in his third NHL season, getting an assist on November 15th, 2022 as the Canucks beat the Buffalo Sabres. The Canucks then celebrated Lockwood’s first point, his only one in the NHL to date, by trading him in February along with a 7th round pick to the New York Rangers for another notorious draft bust, Vitali Kravtsov. Lockwood never played for the Rangers, playing 18 games with the team’s AHL affiliate, the Hartford Wolfpack, scoring 12 points. Lockwood, at age 25, is a free agent for the first time this summer, and it will be interesting to see if a team picks him up to give him one last shot at the NHL, but if this is it for him, then Lockwood finishes with 28 games, 1 point, 11 penalty minutes, and -0.9 point shares at the NHL level, putting him on the relatively long list of picks by former Canucks’ GM Jim Benning that didn’t pan out.
2017: Jake Leschyshyn, C (62nd Overall, Vegas Golden Knights): -1.0 PS
Curtis Leschyshyn played in 1,033 NHL games and won a Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche in 1996. His son, Jake, on the other hand, has played 957 fewer games than his father (at the time of writing) and also has a nightmarishly awful -1.0 point shares in those 76 games, the worst from the 2017 draft by a considerable margin (Lias Andersson and Kristian Vesalainen are both tied for second worst with -0.6 point shares). The younger Leschyshyn had a good scoring touch in the WHL, playing for the Regina Pats and the Lethbridge Hurricanes, but that never really translated to the professional level until he put up almost a point-per-game in 2021-22 with the AHL’s Henderson Silver Knights. In that same 2021-22, Leschyshyn made his NHL debut and played in 41 games for Vegas, managing 2 goals and 4 assists playing mostly on the fourth line. Vegas missed the playoffs for the first time in franchise history that season although that was not entirely Leschyshyn’s fault to be fair (just a convenient coincidence). Leschyshyn was a full-time member of Vegas’ roster this past season, playing 22 games yet scoring no points. He was often a healthy scratch until he was claimed off of waivers in January 2023 by the New York Rangers, who played him in 13 games, where he proceeded to score no points, before putting him on waivers again and sending him to Hartford, where he actually did pretty well, scoring 15 points in 18 games and contributing 3 points in his 5 Calder Cup playoff games with the Wolfpack. Leschyshyn has 2 years remaining on his contract with the Rangers and, given the team’s cap situation, could find himself back in the NHL again if his AHL production continues to be consistent. Leschyshyn’s awful 2022-23 season, where he achieved -0.9 point shares, could easily end up in the rear view mirror if he gets his career back on track with the Rangers. The 24-year-old may not have a lot of time left to improve on his 76 games and 6 points (2 goals, 4 assists) and while he’ll probably never play as many games as his dad did, Leschyshyn still has a chance, however small it may be, to get his career back on track in the final two years of his contract with the Rangers.
2018: Sampo Ranta, LW (78th Overall, Colorado Avalanche): -0.4 PS
Sampo Ranta is still relatively young (he’s only 23), and he’s only played in 16 NHL games, but when you look at every player from the 2018 draft who’s played NHL games, Ranta ends up being the lowest one on the ladder, with -0.4 career point shares. It’s not by a wide margin as four other players have point shares of -0.2 or -0.3, but Ranta is the only one with a mark of -0.4, making him the worst one so far. Ranta was a big, heavy winger with some scoring upside based on his production with the USHL’s Sioux City Musketeers and at the University of Minnesota, but that upside hasn’t translated to the pro ranks as even at the AHL level, Ranta hasn’t achieved more than half a point per game. His NHL debut with the Avalanche came in the 2020-21 playoffs as he played 2 games without scoring a point. To date, they are Ranta’s only appearances in an NHL playoff game. He’s spent the next two seasons, including this past one, bouncing between the NHL and AHL with the Avalanche and their affiliate, the Colorado Eagles. Ranta got to play in 10 games in the 2021-22 season (not enough to be considered a Cup winning player) and 6 games in 2022-23. He failed to score a point in both seasons and his entry-level contract has officially expired. The 23-year-old forward is a restricted free agent this summer, but it’s uncertain whether or not Colorado will give him a qualifying offer to retain his rights or just let him go. If they choose the latter option, then there’s a good chance Ranta will finish his NHL career with no points in just 16 games. There’s still plenty of time for some other player from this class to eclipse that -0.4 point shares mark, so there’s a chance that in a few years, someone else takes the “worst player” spot away from Ranta, but as of 2023, five years from the 2018 Draft, Sampo Ranta put up the worst performance of any player from this class even in the extremely small amount of games that he played.
This officially concludes this series on the worst players from each draft class from 2010 to 2018. Once again, Part 1 can be accessed here if you haven’t already read it. I hope that you enjoyed reading about this as much as I enjoyed researching this topic, designing the graphs for it, and then writing about it. Every year, hundreds of players go to the draft, hope to get the chance to be selected by a team and then play in the NHL. Although no player wants to end up on a list like this, all of these men at least got to play in the NHL. They got more than a lot of other drafted players get: an opportunity to play at the highest level. Even if their careers certainly did not go as well as these players had hoped for, they can at least know that they got farther and achieved more than thousands of other professional hockey players ever did, even if they ended up being the worst player in the best league.
More information on Point Shares, including how it is calculated can be seen by clicking on this link