Overview
I know for the NFL draft, there is a great resource and Twitter account called @GrindingMocks , who looks at a bunch of different mock drafts from across the community to create a consensus board. There are also neat graphics like this that track how a players ranking has changed over time:
I obviously can't do that because I only had rankings from the end of the season, but I could still look at expected draft position and who consensus thinks were steals/fallers. Now research on the NFL draft shows mixed results with fallers, sometimes they're actually falling for a valid reason that the public is unaware of, others they are actually good picks, but reaches by consensus are usually still reaches. And that is looking at the NFL draft, where there is more information about each player before the draft, usually years of tape against relatively similar competition, and players are expected to make an impact almost immediately, so you know whether or not you hit on an evaluation soon after the draft. Comparing that to the NHL draft where players don't make the league for 3+ years sometimes, you have to be evaluating players for years before you know if your first evaluations were good or not, then can adjust your process from there. You also have to learn how to evaluate players playing in many different leagues, which can be tricky adjusting for the speed and pace of the game, along with different styles of play in different leagues. However for the NFL draft you do have to learn to evealuate many different positions, vs hockey any skater evaluation is similar enough to another. There are at least far more similarities between Ds and Fs than there are between QBs and LBs or WRs and OLs. Then to add to all of those challenges for the NHL draft we also have to worry about the popularity of the draft, I was only able to find ~50 rankings, vs the NFL draft where there are many more experts and just hobby-ists publishing draft rankings because it is so much more popular. I also have no backing for this, but I feel like there is a lot more groupthink in NHL draft rankings than NFL ones. There seem to be next to no debates about players being vastly underrated or overated by various rankings in the NHL draft, but between the few rankings I follow for the NFL draft there always seem to be a few players that are ranked wildly apart from each other or compared to consensus.
The way I went about collecting the data for this was relatively simple. I just searched 2025 NHL draft rankings, or 2025 NHL mock draft and whatnot on twitter and colleceted all of the results I could find. I put all of the results in a big spreadshet then cleaned up all of the names so they matched each other so I was able to compare list to list easily. I then took the average ranking for each player, but there was an issue with how much a player was ranked. If a player was ranked once, 50th overall by one outlet, but not ranked in any of the other outlets, his average rank would be 50. Obviously in that case the player should not be the 50th ranked player in this class, but how much lower should he be ranked, because the fact thet he wasn't ranked by someone who only ranked 32 players isn't nearly as shocking as him not being ranked by someone who ranked 300 players. So I punished each player differently by estimating where the player would be ranked by adding 1/2 the players average rank to the number of players ranked by the outlet that didn't rank that player. I didn't want to just assume every player unranked would have been the next player on the list, because for outlets that only ranked 32 players, putting someone whos average rank by 5 outlets was 150th as the 33rd player would unfairly be skewing them upwards. I thought this was a good balance of not skewing players upwards, but not just ignoring outlets that left players unranked. So for example if a player was ranked by 52 of te 53 rankings I tracked with an average rank of 100, and the 53rd site ranked 100 players but didn't include that one, I would have put the estimated rank down as 150 and recalculated the average. However if the 53rd outlet only ranked 32 players, I would put the estimated rank down as 116 and recalculate. I also did this step all at once for every outlet that didn't rank a player, so if a player was only ranked 1 time at 150th, I calculated the estimated rank for all the other rankings (150+1/2*32, 150+1/2*64, 150+1/2*100) then took the average of all of the new rankings.
Results
The results for this project was incredibly funny to me because how well it tracked with the consensus I saw throughout the year. It makes sense that it would, being a consensus board, but my only thought when looking at this was yeah, that makes sense for what everyone thinks.
Just starting at the top, there was a clear top 2 with Schaefer and Misa in one tier. Then Hagens and Martone in their own second tier seemed to be settled by the time the draft rolled around, though them falling past 3-4 in the draft wasn't shocking given the reports of who teams liked. Then Frondell, Desnoyers, and and Eklund in their own tier 3 makes sense because I feel like this draft had a clear top 7 then just a bunch of ??? after that. I'm not going to go player by player, for the rest of the class because as I said there isn't really anything shocking. I guess Potter might be a bit lower than I expected from what I heard, but not sure on that. I will also use this, and the other models I made to grade the teams drafts, in the next article, so I won't be diving into team by team analysis here. I also looked at each individual ranking and looked at which players they were highest or lowest on relative to consensus, and which outlets were most and least similar to the consensus. I don't want to repost all of that here, but it can be found on my twitter here if anybody is interested
Also, if you noticed there are less than 32 players per round, you would be correct. But that makes sense for two reasons. First, if you ask any NHL team, they almost never have exactly 32 players with "true first round grades" and its almost always less than 32 players, so I wasn't upset by this having less than 32 true first round grades. Second is because my punishment for being unranked was slightly too harsh, maybe if I had tweaked it to be 1/3*the average rank instead of 1/2 it may have been closer to 32 players per round, but I wasn't too worried about that. I was more worried about overrating players who were only ranked once or twice.
Data
I collected almost all of the rankings from publicly posted rankings on Twitter or Instagram. A few of them I had to go to goole for, or found on other sites like hockeyDB or reddit. Then some of the outlets like Eliteprospects or FC hockey I had to go to their website specifically. I also got all the heights and weights and teams from NHLCS for players ranked by them, or EP for those unranked by NHLCS but ranked on other boards. I also am just now realizing my age formula must be messed up because Haoxi Wang is not 19, but I don't care to fix that right now. If you care that much you can look up how old a player is, I didn't use that age list for any of my other models.