Consolidated Draft Rankings
Based on 14 Different Official Services

Hey all,

I’m going to share with you a project I’ve been working on over the season in regards to the upcoming NHL Draft. Some of you may remember MidlandWingsFan74’s 2019 Draft Consensus Draft Rankings that was posted last year. I was actually working on something similar at the time but never got around to expanding upon it, so I’ve adapted it to 2020.

Here’s what I’ve done: I have taken the rankings from 14 different official services (some of which are behind a paywall, so I can’t show the rankings themselves). I’ve then used these numbers to find the average ranking for each player, the standard deviation of those rankings (how volatile they are) and the expected range they are expected to be drafted in (Average ±Standard Deviation).

Services

Here are the rankings that I used for this list:

Disclaimers

These numbers should tell us a lot about what public consensus is on how good these players are and where they are expected to go. There are some obvious disclaimers I need to make, however:

1. These are based on 14 rankings from various media services. NHL scouting departments don’t particularly care about these rankings (Corey Pronman has a good article on this that just came off of a paywall). Teams can and will pick players outside of standard deviation, just ask Moritz Seider.
2. 7/14 services didn’t rank beyond the top 31. This means that players around that area and further back aren’t ranked by all or even most services. With a lower sample of rankings this means that these rankings are significantly less reliable the further back you go.
3. If a player was not ranked by a service I did not try to assume where they were ranked. This means that, especially in the mid-late 1st round, players who are ranked by less services have their averages inflated. For example: Jacob Perreault was ranked at an average of 26.38 by 13/14 services. One service did not have him in the top 31, however. If that service did have him ranked his average would drop to at least 26.79 by all 14 services. So while his average is guaranteed to be lower than listed, I did not assume his ranking. This becomes more pronounced the less services rank an otherwise highly ranked player.
4. These are obviously not my opinions/evaluation of these players. In many cases my own rankings vary extremely differently from these rankings. I will then give my own opinions in the latter posts, however. I just wanted to make sure then nobody confuses the two.
5. As you could likely see in the table before, not all of these rankings are up to date. Given the sudden unexpected end to the season and my subsequent boredom I decided to go ahead with this anyways. I will try to make sure to update this after each of the services updates to their year-end rankings.

The Rankings

Here’s a list of every player that has an average ranking better than 100 (104 total players). I have eliminated players only ranked by one service. I also have a full version of the 332 players I have ranked on a google doc here.

Rank = The Average ranking of all rankings which listed the player
SD = Standard Deviation for said rankings
High = Highest ranked by any service.
Low = Lowest ranked by any service

There are a few areas to note here.

Alexis Lafreniere is the consensus #1 pick, all services have him ranked 1st. We’re going to consider Lafreniere as a guaranteed 1st overall selection going forward. There’s also a very clear cluster of players ranked above 7th overall on average. This will feature heavily in the next part and will thus be referred to as the top 8 cluster. This group is a testament to how strong the draft is in the top area of the draft.

That’s this part wrapped up then, if you have any questions about any of the rankings or players let me know, I’ll try to keep an eye on the comments. In the next part we’re going to go over each of the Red Wings options with their 1st pick, wherever it lands. We’ll look at who might be available, as well as some personal opinions.