There are two coexisting theses that this is about. The first is my long-held belief that once you get late in the draft (what is late? who’s to say? let’s suppose it means starting in round 3…), the actual pick slot basically does not matter. Of course in theory a 4th round pick is more valuable than a 7th round pick, because there are more, and theoretically better, players available. In practice, the difference between the number of 4th round picks which become useful NHL players and the number of 7th round picks is negligible. Let’s start the case study in 2014 and 2015. It’s hard to say definitively what a “useful” player is, and maybe there will be some disagreement over my picks. There is no objective criteria being used, just a list of guys who play above the level of bottom 6 plug. But I will argue for:

Round 3: Warren Foegele, Elvis Merzlinkins, Brayden Point, Ilya Sorokin, Anthony Cirelli, Adin Hill

Round 4: Ville Husso, Devon Toews, Viktor Arvidsson, Danton Heinen, Michael Bunting, Igor Shesterkin, Nic Roy

Round 5: Gustav Forsling, Oskar Lindblom, Connor Garland, Ethan Bear Kirill Kaprizov, Troy Terry

Round 6: Kevin LaBanc, John Marino, Vladislav Gavrikov, Andrew Mangiapane

Round 7: Victor Olofsson, Pierre Engvall, Ondrej Kase, Matt Roy

Rounds 3 and 4 here both produced a legit superstar goaltender, which you can’t say about the later rounds. But as far as skaters go these groups look kind of equal? I would take Terry and Mangiapane over any of the round 4 forwards, and the Marino-Gavrikov shutdown pair from round 6 would be well above any combos from previous rounds. The other note though, is that this list has an awful lot of Europeans. Europeans made up 30% of the NHL last year, but 12/27 (44%) of this list. The leading scorer of all NHL players taken after round 2 in the 2016 draft? Jesper Bratt, a Swedish 6th round pick.

On the most basic level, the why here seems obvious: NHL teams are better at scouting North Americans than Europeans. They have a pretty good idea of who the best North American prospects are, and so those guys go in the first two rounds. The have a much worse idea of what the best Swedes or Czech prospects are (there’s less film, much less chance to watch them in person, etc), so more top prospects from those countries fall to the bottom of the draft.

The next counterpoint that you might be thinking of: if this seems so obvious, why aren’t NHL teams using this knowledge to draft huge swaths of Euro-league players in the later rounds? It turns out, some do. Since Kyle Dubas took over the Maple Leafs management at the 2018 draft, his teams have made 28 picks outside of the top 2 rounds. 12 of those draft picks were playing in European leagues, with an additional 3 Europeans who were playing in CHL leagues. 53% of Dubas’ “late picks” were Europeans, in a league where Europeans make up just 30% of the players. Julien BriseBois’ Lightning have drafted a Russian in either the 6th or 7th round every year since he took over as GM for the 2019 draft. This isn’t a new strategy, of course. It dates back to at least the 1990s-2000s Red Wings dynasty, which was able to sustain success for so long by drafting franchise players like Nicklas Lidstrom (3rd round pick from the Swedish league), Sergei Fedorov (4th round pick from Russia), Pavel Datsyuk (round 6, Russia), and Henrik Zetterberg (round 7, Sweden). The lesson in all of this is simple: if your team is using a 5th round draft pick on an SHL player nobody on the TV broadcast has ever heard of, it was probably a much better move than grabbing an OHL plug.