Nobody You Drafted Is Playing

The preseason opened on Friday. Seven games that night, seven more on Saturday, twenty-five of the thirty-two teams on the ice, and for the first time since June there was actual hockey to watch instead of line rushes described secondhand by somebody standing at the glass.

Fourteen games, two rosters of twenty dressed players apiece, is 560 roster spots. Fifty-eight of them, 10.4 per cent, belonged to a player carrying a draft position. The other 502 belonged to players nobody in your league is going to draft.

The rest of this piece covers why that number is lower than you think, why it is lowest exactly where you care most, and what the games are actually good for.

The better the player, the less likely he played

Of the 220 ranked players on the board, 58 have appeared in a preseason game and 162 have not. Split them by where they go in a draft and the pattern is uneven:

Twenty-nine of the fifty highest-ranked players have not played a shift. The list is the first two rounds of almost any draft: MacKinnon, Celebrini, Makar, Kaprizov, Pastrnak, Werenski, both Hughes brothers, Robertson, Boldy, Dahlin, Schaefer, Eichel, Rantanen, Tage Thompson, Johnston, Kyle Connor, Fox, Sanderson, Panarin, Guenther, Seider, Marner, Bedard, Josi, Heiskanen, Scheifele, Keller and Stützle.

Only one of them has a publicly stated injury keeping him out: Cale Makar, day-to-day with an upper-body problem, expected back for Colorado's second set of games. The rest are not hurt. They are being managed, and their coaches have eight days until the games count.

The 26-to-50 band is the exception: 52 per cent, more than double every band except the top twenty-five. Montreal, Tampa Bay, Florida and Toronto happened to open early with real lineups, and that scheduling accident accounts for it.

Four games contained nobody at all

Four of the fourteen games, 160 roster spots, did not contain one player anyone is drafting. The Islanders–Devils game was a prospect showcase in all but name: Cole Eiserman and Kashawn Aitcheson dressed for New York, Anton Silaev skated beside Vladislav Kolyachonok for New Jersey, and the most recognisable name on the ice was David Rittich.

Dallas is the one to sit with. The Stars have eight ranked players, among them Robertson at 14.4, Rantanen at 22.5, Johnston at 24.7 and Heiskanen at 40.8. They dressed none of them. If you watched that game looking for information about the Dallas players on your board, you watched a game with a zero per cent chance of providing any.

Which teams showed you anything

Nine teams dressed zero of their ranked players: Dallas, New Jersey, Vegas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minnesota, Winnipeg, St. Louis and the Islanders. Montreal and Toronto went the other way entirely: they played each other twice on the same night with two completely separate squads and no shared players, which is how a club fields nine of its nine draftable names in one evening.

Seven teams have not played at all yet: Buffalo, Columbus, Detroit, the Rangers, Ottawa, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

So if your read on a player comes from "I watched him in the preseason," check which column his team is in first. There is a decent chance the honest version is "I watched his organisation's third line."

Who is actually getting the ice time

The minutes go to the players fighting for the last jobs, and that is the most useful thing in these games.

Half that list is undraftable, and the reasons are specific. Tristan Luneau is twenty-two, has fourteen NHL games to his name, and Anaheim's right side emptied out when John Carlson, Jacob Trouba and Radko Gudas all left. He is playing twenty-five minutes because there is a job on the other end of it. Korchinski and Del Mastro are Chicago's seventh and eighth defencemen by the team's own description, the two extras; Del Mastro signed a two-year deal the day before camp opened. They are getting the minutes precisely because their spots are the ones in question.

That inversion is the rule. A coach gives twenty-five preseason minutes to a player he has not decided about. The players you drafted in the first two rounds are not in question, so they get fifteen minutes or they get a night off.

Zoom out from those ten names and the picture holds. I pulled the career record of all 550 distinct players who filled those 560 slots. One hundred and sixty-nine of them, nearly a third, have never played a regular-season NHL game. Three hundred and forty, better than three in five, have played fewer than eighty-two, which is to say less than one full season. The median age is twenty-five. Narrow it to the 492 who carry no draft position at all and it gets starker: 34 per cent of them have never appeared in an NHL game, and 68 per cent have not played a season's worth.

So these fourteen games were played mostly by a different population from the NHL's, and most of it will spend October in the American League.

The market is ignoring these games too, and it is right to

Between Friday's board and Saturday's, across all fourteen games, the average ranked player moved 0.298 of a pick. Forty-two of the 220 did not move at all. Not one player entered or left the board. The largest single move on the entire board was Jake Walman, two picks.

The board is behaving the same way about news that isn't preseason. Connor Hellebuyck refused to report to camp and was suspended by Winnipeg on 16 September. He has moved from 68.8 to 69.7, nine-tenths of a pick, and he is still the fifth goalie off the board. Cutter Gauthier signed for six years and $81 million on 15 September and moved one-tenth, from 29.5 to 29.6. Adam Fantilli has missed four days of camp in an unresolved holdout, two to three million apart on average annual value, and has moved two-tenths.

You can read that as a market asleep at the wheel. I read most of it as correct. A preseason shift is close to worthless as evidence, and a board that lurched every time a twenty-two-year-old scored against somebody's fourth line would be worse than one that sits still. The Hellebuyck price is the one I would not defend. A goaltender with no confirmed team to play for is not a top-five goalie at any price, which is the argument I made when he first asked out, before a suspension was part of it.

What the preseason is actually for

You will not learn anything about MacKinnon from a game he did not play, and you will not learn much from Bouchard's twenty-five minutes either.

The games do show the one thing a draft board cannot tell you: who wins the last three or four jobs on each roster. Those players are your waiver wire in October. In a best-ball pool that hardly matters: you drafted eighteen players and you are done. In a league with a cap, a roster you set every week, and a wire you actually work, the difference between guessing at the twelfth forward and knowing who won the job in camp is a month of free points.

That is where your remaining viewing time should go. The first two rounds of your draft are settled and nothing in the next eight days will unsettle them. The bottom of your roster is not settled at all, and it is the only part these games are showing you.

Opening night is Tuesday 29 September.