It’s been five years since the 2018 NHL Draft — plenty of time to judge and evaluate the picks made by NHL teams. Today I’m going to look back on this draft and see what lessons we can learn from some of the most notable picks made in the first round, and how some of those picks have, or have not, met expectations.
The Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Barrett Hayton picks
Jesperi Kotkaniemi and Barrett Hayton were both very interesting top-five picks. They were both seen as highly skilled and intelligent centers. They also had skating flaws and their production in their respective leagues, Liiga and OHL, wasn’t amazing for a pair of top-five picks.
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Kotkaniemi had great international performances, including leading Finland to a gold medal at the U18 worlds. Hayton played on a very deep Soo Greyhounds club where he still showed high-end skill on their PP1, and played very well with Canada at the Hlinka Gretzky.
They have since both developed into very good, albeit not star players. They were both 40-point centers in the NHL this past season — Kotkaniemi has played a notable role on Carolina’s run to the Eastern Conference finals while Hayton was a regular on Arizona’s PK.
There’s rarely ever such thing as a perfect prospect after No. 1 or 2. Brady Tkachuk had skating issues. Quinn Hughes and Adam Boqvist were small players. Vitali Kravtsov and Evan Bouchard had skating flaws, too. Filip Zadina doesn’t compete that well. All of those players were top-10 picks in the same draft.
Ideally, picking very high in the draft means eliminating as much risk as possible though, unless the player you are picking is special in certain areas. Kotkaniemi and Hayton were both excellent and talented prospects, but I wouldn’t call them special in terms of their skill and hockey sense.
New post @TheAthleticNHL: Re-ranking the 2018 NHL Draft class https://t.co/4bb9iKdCrw — Corey Pronman (@coreypronman) October 20, 2022
Hindsight is 20/20 — I liked Kotkaniemi a lot at the time, for example. But it’s interesting to compare them to the two top-10 picks who became legit stars in Tkachuk and Hughes. Tkachuk had special physicality/compete and elite international performance even though his college numbers were just fine. Hughes had special skating and puck game and was very good with his club and internationally. I see the arguments for Kotkaniemi and Hayton over them at the time, but comparing the profiles is interesting.
One player that comes to mind the most in the 2023 draft when thinking about Kotkaniemi and Hayton is Dalibor Dvorsky. He’s a center with average skating, is very skilled and has had very good stretches, both at the club and international level, but his production in Allsvenskan this season wasn’t amazing. Dvorsky could become an excellent NHL player, but the risk profiles in a top-10 pick look quite similar to me.
Big, mobile defenders outplayed the small puck-movers
The 2018 draft saw a lot of big bets by teams on smaller defensemen who could provide offense. Hughes, Boqvist, Ty Smith, Ryan Merkley, Jacob Bernard-Docker, Nicolas Beaudin, Nils Lundkvist and Rasmus Sandin were the defensemen 6 feet or shorter who went in the first round.
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Noah Dobson, K’Andre Miller and Alexander Alexeyev were the defensemen 6-foot-3 or taller who went in Round 1, with Mattias Samuelsson being the 33rd pick.
The second group looks superior to the first group, both on a total-value standpoint and especially on a per-capita basis. Dobson, Miller and Samuelsson developed into core parts of their NHL clubs and look like guys who will have very long careers playing significant minutes. Outside of Hughes, I can’t confidently say that of anyone else in the first group even if they are good players.
We certainly saw in 2018 that NHL teams were chasing skill at the defense position, trying to acquire the “modern” NHL defenseman. But the data tells a less clear story about what a modern defenseman is.
It’s interesting when looking at the top defensemen in this year’s draft. David Reinbacher, Oliver Bonk and Dmitri Simashev for example have size, skating ability and two-way value. Axel Sandin Pellikka is more the offensive puck-mover; you question how well he’ll defend in the NHL. If you’re talking about Sandin Pellikka going high in the first round, it’s worth really asking how blown away by the talent you are, or if he’s closer to Smith/Lunkvist as a player.
Wait for Kirill Marchenko
A fair number of NHL scouts at the time of the 2018 draft thought Marchenko was a first-round pick on pure ability, a later first that is. He had a rare combination of traits between his size, speed, skill and scoring ability. They also all thought there were signability issues with him out of Russia. Sure enough, he ended up signing a two-year KHL extension with SKA at one point after his NHL Draft. It went well at times for him with SKA, but not always, as he was demoted to the VHL in his final year over.
But then he came over to North America, and since he arrived in Columbus, it’s been all positive. He tore up the AHL in the first half of the season and was one of the best rookies in the NHL in the second half.
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Marchenko went 49th. In looking at the five immediate players picked before him — Jonny Tychonick, Kody Clark, Martin Fehervary, Scott Perunovich and Albin Eriksson — Fehervary is the only one who looks like he’ll have an NHL career.
This is worth keeping in mind when the hand-wringing happens over top Russian prospects like Daniil But, Dmitri Simashev and Mikhail Gulyayev, with Matvei Michkov being his own unique case. Obviously, there was no invasion of Ukraine at the time, and that is a significant new variable at play. With Russian prospects though, the good ones usually come and the wait tends to be worth it if they are good. I get the argument that if it’s close you take the other guy, but some of the players selected near 49 weren’t close to Marchenko in terms of skill. His toolkit has a lot of rhymes to But and Simashev in terms of mobility, size and puck game.
The Athletic: Scary question | What would this Blue Jackets’ season have been like without rookies Kirill Marchenko and Kent Johnson?
Together, they’re part of the most productive season ever for Blue Jackets’ rookies.https://t.co/5zlwsPwoYV pic.twitter.com/PcGhKrkF6e — Aaron Portzline (@Aportzline) April 4, 2023
Going off the board for Filip Johansson
Filip Johansson, who was picked 24th in 2018, was seen as a somewhat off-the-board pick at the time among public lists. Bob McKenzie’s survey of NHL scouts had him 54th. Some NHL scouts I talked to at the time said they had Johansson rated as a second-round pick. I also heard the odd evaluator had him rated as a late first-round guy, and quite a few at the time had him rated a lot lower. Johansson ended up being one of the rare first-round picks unsigned by the team that drafted him. He was good enough to be signed, but the team preferred the compensatory second-round pick.
While he’s been the butt end of quite a few jokes since then, it’s not fair to the player. He was a good prospect at the time. He played top-four minutes on Sweden’s U18 team. He played real minutes on a good Allsvenskan team. The question is whether he was worth it at 24.
Johansson’s profile was an average-sized right-shot defenseman who was a good skater. His puck-moving ability was seen as good enough, along with a high compete level and strong mobility, to project as a solid pro defender with potential first-pass offense. He didn’t end up developing into a standout at either end of the rink but has still been a solid pro defenseman in the SHL.
There are players in this year’s draft who look similar and who I have rated highly such as Maxim Strbak and Gavin McCarthy. They are mobile, physical right-shot defensemen who have some but not a ton of offense, although both are a little bigger than Johansson. If I was drafting I would be comfortable taking either of them in the second round, but the first round would make me weary, in part because of how players like Johansson can develop. Given his skating and size were NHL average and he had below-average offense, being off just a little on the compete or offensive projection can turn a good prospect into a mediocre one. That’s too much risk at the No. 24 pick. If you’re going to take that style of player in the first, he needs to be a high-end skater or competitor, or be a 6-foot-3/6-foot-4 defenseman.
Jay O’Brien pick
A big part of a scout’s job is projection, and trying to place a given player with a certain toolkit at a lower level of competition in the NHL one day.
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In my opinion, the biggest uncertainty when it comes to translating to higher levels is the degree of offense a player will produce. A guy who is 6-foot-2 and skates well in high school should be 6-foot-2 and skate well in the NHL. The biggest deltas in terms of missing, both high and low, tend to be on the skill and hockey sense evaluations.
Which brings us to Jay O’Brien, the 19th pick in 2018 by Philadelphia out of Thayer Academy. O’Brien was average-sized and a good, not amazing skater. He played a couple of games with the U.S. NTDP where he looked good and had a handful of USHL games, but he had very little high-level experience in junior or international tournaments. The bet was he showed good skating, skill and compete in high school; that he was a well-rounded prospect and would be so as a pro.
But given the pure athletic tools in his size and speed, it was a massive bet the skill would be there at higher levels. If you missed even a little on the skill, all of a sudden you have an average-sized and average-skating forward who doesn’t score much, and those are a dime a dozen. The skill missed (he also wasn’t as much of a high-motor guy as I and some scouts thought he would be). He scored five points in 25 games as a freshman at Providence and never surpassed a point per game at college.
This is not to pick on O’Brien, who looked like a good prospect at the time. The point is if you’re going to take a guy without a lot of high-level experience high in the draft — someone in high school, Jr. B, a non-traditional top Europe league etc. — then the athletic toolkit or the pure offensive touch better be exceptional, because you don’t have a ton of evidence yet that he can get it done versus better players and you need to leave some margin of error on the projection. This is instructive, for this year’s draft, in thinking about someone like Bradly Nadeau in the BCHL whose Penticton team runs over their competition nightly.
Flyers taking Jay O’Brien another off the board one. Lot of lists had him in the 40s. Leafs are going to get good player at 25. — James Mirtle (@mirtle) June 23, 2018
Ty Dellandrea pick
Ty Dellandrea being picked by Dallas at No. 13 wasn’t anywhere close to the most interesting pick of the night, but it’s one I’ve thought about a lot since. Dellandrea had average size and even more average junior production, albeit on some terrible Flint teams with no support around him. He had good tools and checked the boxes of an NHL player. He’s a good skater, he has skill and goal-scoring ability, and he competed well at both ends as a center at the time. He also played a prominent role on some Canada U18 teams in his draft season.
There was certainly a lack of a “wow” factor in his game both at the time and today. He wasn’t the quickest, biggest, most skilled or creative guy in the world. He scored, but never a ton anywhere. I saw a well-rounded player, but I think there were reasonable questions on the high side of the player even at the time.
And I don’t mean to disparage Dellandrea. He played regular minutes on the wing on a good team this season in his first full year in the NHL. I also don’t mean to say this was a bad pick. Other than Joel Farabee, the immediate players picked after haven’t fared that well and once Noah Dobson went at No. 12 the consensus-ish top tier of players were gone. I also think if you re-did that draft he goes closer to 20, not much of a drop.
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You don’t pick in the top 15 very often ideally, and when you do you want to try to leave with real talent, or if it’s a two-way type of player, you want to leave with high-end two-way ability, such as a player like Anton Lundell. If Dellandrea finds his way into becoming a 2C or even a 3C long term it’s more palatable, though.
It’s an interesting comparison when thinking of someone like Ryan Leonard or Brayden Yager in this year’s draft who are competitive and well-rounded but not high-end offensively with average size.
(Photo of Jesperi Kotkaniemi at the 2018 NHL Draft: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)