Prospect to Suspect: The Four Biggest Draft Busts from 2015 to 2018
Whether it's bad scouting, bad development, or just bad luck, there are plenty of draft picks in recent years that haven't worked out. Let's look at four and see why these prospects became suspect
It’s that time of year again: the NHL Draft is right around the corner, the one time a year where general managers and scouts have to risk their careers and reputations to try and get the young talent needed to build their respective organizations into a contender. It’s a time when the future is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, no matter how many picks your team has or whether or not your team is rebuilding; any one selection could end up being the difference between winning a championship and losing a job. There have been plenty of fantastic picks made in recent years that ended up being franchise-changing players or quality depth pieces that helped teams push for championship. This piece isn’t about those picks however. This is about the regrets, the busts, the guys who could have been so much more than they were but for whatever reason, they just couldn’t hack it at the NHL level the way many people thought that they should have been able to. It usually takes a while to really see a draft class come to fruition, so I’m limiting the selection to some of the drafts of the mid-to-late 2010’s, 2015 to 2018 to be exact. One player will be picked from each year and then we’ll figure it whether or not it was bad luck, bad development, or just a bad reach.
The main metric used for this analysis will be 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. Points per game also would be skewed in favor of forwards, since defensemen often don’t score a lot of points yet still remain valuable to their team, leading to them contributing to the team’s overall point total, which is shown in the Point Shares metric. 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.
Each player profile will also include the player’s prospect card from Byron Bader’s hockeyprospecting.com to see how each player developed (or regressed) over time from the year before they became draft eligible (D-1 year) to three years after their first draft eligible season (D+3 year) in terms of NHLe.2 With that being said, let’s get into the list.
2015: Zach Senyshyn, RW, Boston Bruins (15th Overall)
At the time, this pick was seen as a reach by the Boston Bruins, and his Hockey Prospecting card shows that Senyshyn wasn’t even close to a sure thing at even making the NHL, let alone being worth a lottery pick. There was some decent upside there, as some outlets compared the Canadian to Chris Kreider and praised his fearlessness on the attack, but for the most part, everyone seemed to agree that Bruins GM Don Sweeney was taking a major gamble on Senyshyn with the last of his three first round picks. This gamble did not pay off; Senyshyn has only played 16 NHL games up to this point, only scored 3 points and has 0.1 point shares in that time. That point share number is the lowest of any first round selection from the 2015 Draft and the next three selections (Mat Barzal, Kyle Connor, and Thomas Chabot) all are in the top 15 players from this draft class in point shares (see graph below player card). Senyshyn was traded to Ottawa at the 2022 trade deadline in exchange for depth defenseman Josh Brown and left the Senators organization as a free agent not long after, spending this past season with the Utica Comets and Chicago Wolves, two AHL teams, and was not under contract with an NHL team. Given his poor and ineffective performances in his brief stints in the NHL and his lackluster performances at the AHL in recent years (only 18 points in 62 total games in the 2022-23 season), it’s looking like the 26-year-old Senyshyn’s brief NHL career is finished. The disappointing thing for him is that it wasn’t Senyshyn’s fault that Don Sweeney thought so highly of him to take him in the first round; it’s more on Sweeney and his scouting staff for taking such a huge gamble with that pick that ended up backfiring when there were much better players available at that selection that ended up being much better players at the NHL level. In what likely ends up as one of the best drafts in NHL history, the Boston Bruins made a huge mistake right in the middle of a stacked first round, and considering how much their team could use a talented forward like Mat Barzal right now, I expect a lot of regret in Boston over picking Senyshyn back in 2015.
2016: Olli Juolevi, D, Vancouver Canucks (5th Overall)
When the Vancouver Canucks drafted Olli Juolevi in the 2016 draft, it looked like a great pick. Sure, he wasn’t rated as highly as his London Knights teammate and the very next pick: some guy by the name of Matthew Tkachuk. But, there was a lot to be excited for. Juolevi demonstrated a strong two-way style of play in the OHL, quarterbacking the Knights’ power play and being a more than capable defender, using his positioning and excellent skating to cut off passing lanes and make it tough to get to the net. Defensemen like Juolevi very often make the NHL and do have a decent chance at becoming superstars. To many, he looked like the type of player who was capable of playing big minutes in all situations for his team, yet somehow, 7 years later, Juolevi has only played 41 games and couldn’t even get a game in at the NHL level this season for an awful Anaheim Ducks team, spending the entire year with the AHL’s San Diego Gulls. Well, that ‘somehow’ was injuries, a lot of them. It started in 2018, when he herniated a disc in his back while training for the transition to North American pro hockey after a season in Finland with TPS Turku. After recovering from the back injury, Juolevi then suffered a devastating knee injury with the Utica Comets, the Canucks’ AHL affiliate at the time, after only 18 games, requiring another surgery and another long recovery. He then had several undisclosed injuries, one reportedly with his hip, and two more surgeries before Vancouver flipped him to Florida before the 2021-22 season in a swap of minor league players. By the time he got to Florida however, Juolevi was simply not the same player. Years of surgery and injuries took a huge toll on his body and he couldn’t move anywhere near as well as he did back in juniors. Florida then placed him on waivers after 10 games and he ended up in Detroit, where he played another 8 games before… more injuries ended another season early. It’s not like Juolevi did much with the 41 games he was able to play in in the NHL though, as he only managed 0.8 point shares in his career. The 25-year-old is an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2023 and it looks unlikely that an NHL team will take a flyer on him to rediscover his talents and even more unlikely that he ever will become even close to the player that he was when Vancouver drafted him with the 5th pick in the draft. To add insult to injury (no pun intended), Matt Tkachuk, the guy the Canucks passed on to take Juolevi, has the 2nd highest point shares total of any player from the 2016 draft (57.0) at the time of writing, behind only 1st overall pick Auston Matthews (71.8).
2017: Lias Andersson, C, New York Rangers (7th Overall)
Wait, not Nolan Patrick for 2017? Nope! Patrick’s 222 career games and 4.1 point shares are certainly low for a player that was picked 2nd overall in the draft, but Lias Andersson ended up being worse because while Patrick was at least okay when he was healthy (an extremely rare occasion), Andersson was absolutely awful when he was on the ice, with a point share of -0.6 in his career, meaning that Andersson was actively COSTING his team points rather than CONTRIBUTING to his team throughout his entire career. Andersson has been a great scorer at the AHL level after the Rangers traded him to the Los Angeles Kings organization in October 2020, but it looks likely that the Kings won’t tender the pending restricted free agent a qualifying offer, which likely would spell the end for Andersson’s hockey career in North America, which means that a former top-ten pick will have only played 110 NHL games, scored 17 points at the NHL level, and was actively costing his team points with his performances. The strange thing is when you look at his Hockey Prospecting profile, Andersson didn’t look like a bad selection at 7th overall. It looked like he was almost certain to become an NHLer, and while being a star was about a coin flip, he still likely could have been a solid contributor at the NHL level in his career, but bouts with injuries and issues with his skating more or less put him in a troublesome spot by the time he came over to North America and took what looked like a promising player and turned him into arguably one of the worst top-10 selections in the history of the NHL Draft, especially when you consider the negative game score (-0.6) and the fact that in the 2017 Draft (see graph below player card) no other draft pick inside the top 20 was as ineffective as Andersson was except maybe Urho Vaakanainen, but Vaakanainen at least wasn’t costing his team points simply by being out on the ice.
2018: Vitali Kravtsov, RW, New York Rangers (9th Overall)
Another New York Rangers’ pick here as the Rangers went slightly off the board for the second consecutive year as Russian winger Vitali Kravtsov, much like Lias Andersson the year before, was projected to go about ten picks later than the pick he was selected. Despite this, Kravtsov was seen as a low-risk, high-reward pick with great talent in the offensive zone but was really raw in the defensive zone who had some solid production with Traktor Chelyabinsk in the KHL before coming to North America. However, Kravtsov’s development stalled out once he crossed the Atlantic and the Rangers’ lottery luck in getting the 2nd (Kaapo Kakko) and 1st (Alexis Lafreniere) overall picks in the 2019 and 2020 drafts and their quick pivot from rebuilding to contending after signing Artemi Panarin in free agency. This then blocked Kravtsov from getting ice time at the NHL level as the Rangers did not give him more ice time than the more heralded prospect (Kakko) and the big free agent signing (Panarin), which left Kravtsov as a bit of an odd man out. Kravtsov didn’t help his case much by refusing to report to the Rangers’ AHL affiliate in Hartford and therefore alienating coaches and management who were trying to help him develop his game only for him to behave petulantly, demand a trade on several occasions, and then just go back to Russia for the season when he didn’t get the trade that he wanted. While his Hockey Prospecting card doesn’t indicate that he was a slam dunk NHL caliber player, it does show that players like Kravtsov have decent chances to at least become NHL players; there was talent there with Kravtsov even if it was unlikely that he became a star. The Vancouver Canucks decided to give him a chance and traded for him in February 2023, finally granting his wish for a one-way ticket out of New York. Kravtsov’s time in the Pacific Northwest didn’t go too well as he only managed 2 points in 16 games and recently decided to sign a two-year contract to return home to Russia. There’s a chance Kravtsov could come back to the league if he plays well enough in the KHL, but more likely than not, his NHL career will finish with 64 games, 12 points, and 0.4 point shares, far below the standards of a top-10 pick. If you look at the graph below, you’ll notice that there are actually two first round picks in this draft who have played NHL games yet have achieved a point share value of 0.0. They are Grigori Denisenko (15th overall to Florida) and Liam Foudy (18th overall to Columbus) who are not mentioned here because both at least will likely have an opportunity next season or in the near future to get their careers back on track, while Kravtsov, on the other hand, likely doesn’t have any chance for redemption in the NHL in the near future.
Conclusion
In all of these cases, one clear pattern emerges, a solid argument can be made that each of these teams reached for a guy they wanted with their pick, passing up arguably better players to do so. Of the four, only Juolevi wasn’t a ridiculous reach and Vancouver likely would have been fine to have missed out on Tkachuk had Juolevi become the top-pairing defenseman that he was projected to be. However, it’s worth noting that of the four players listed, only Zach Senyshyn had a less than 20% chance of becoming an NHLer (which Hockey Prospecting defines as having played 200 NHL games) so even if guys like Andersson and Kravtsov were reaches, they likely should have been able to carve out a better NHL career than they’ve ended up having to this points. Some of that comes down to luck (nobody at the time knew the Rangers would sign Artemi Panarin and then win back-to-back draft lotteries) and some of that comes down to the players’ own shortcomings (Kravtsov’s shortcomings defensively and Andersson’s lack of elite playmaking skills in the SHL or the Swedish J20 league). Point shares is certainly not the only metric that can be used to determine how effective a player has been over the course of his career; there are plenty of other ones that could also be used, but it’s a nice way to get a guy’s contributions aggregated into one number and it does track well in showing that each of the four players listed did not have very impactful NHL careers. The draft is a time of taking risks; gambling on the future of players who are only 18 years old is a risky game, and it makes or breaks a general manager’s career, especially in the salary cap era. Managers more often than not, in cases like these, just end up picking the wrong person for reasons of team need (Juolevi) or them just thinking they see something that everyone else doesn’t (Senyshyn), but luck plays a huge factor as well, especially once you take lotteries into the equation (both the Rangers’ picks). Much like with evaluating draft picks years after the fact, there’s no one secret formula or magic number to get that perfect pick during the draft itself. The best strategy seems to be to just take the best player available rather than draft by need or who you just happen to like, and then hope that your pick can avoid the dreaded injuries and is willing to put the work in to take advantage of the talent that made him so coveted in the first place since so many factors go in to making an NHL player an NHL player, and just as many factors go in to making a bust a bust.
QUICK NOTE: Thank you to Byron Bader and Hockey Prospecting for the prospect cards used in this piece. Byron does excellent work and while a paid subscription is required, it’s worth it and I get a lot of really valuable information from Byron and his work. Once again, the cards are not my own creation. All credit goes to Byron Bader and HockeyProspecting.com. Feel free to go to their site and subscribe if you want to support their work and get access to their prospect cards and other tools.
Click the link for a more in-depth explanation on Point Shares and how it is calculated by hockey-reference.com
Byron Bader’s HockeyProspecting model defines NHLe as: How the player’s point production in their given league would translate to the NHL (over an 82 game pace). For example, an NHLe of 40 would on average result in 40 points over 82 games in the NHL the first season after the player transitions over; also used as a way to standardize performance over time