Sixty Players Are Fighting for Twenty Picks

Training camps opened on Thursday 17 September. Thirty-two rosters put skates on the ice for the first time since June, line rushes leaked out of every rink in North America, and a dozen teams updated injuries they had been vague about all summer.

The draft board answered by doing almost nothing.

Between Tuesday's pull and Friday's, the average ranked player moved 0.87 of a pick. Eighteen of the 219 players ranked in both files did not move by a single tenth. Six moved more than three picks.

That holds all the way up the board, and it falls apart completely at the bottom.

Nothing has changed at the top since August

Compare Friday's board to the one pulled three weeks earlier, on 30 August:

Not one name has entered or left the top twenty-five in three weeks. The order shuffles (ten of the twenty-five sit at a different rank than they did), but the shuffling is a tenth of a pick at a time between players nobody is choosing between anyway.

The largest three-week move inside the top fifty belongs to Andrei Vasilevskiy, who has fallen from 38.8 to 49.3. Brady Tkachuk has gone 32.4 to 40.7. Going the other way, Adam Fox has climbed from 36.8 to 30.4 and Clayton Keller from 50.7 to 44.7. Those are the extremes. Everything else in the first four rounds has moved less than the width of a single pick per week.

Then the board collapses into a pile

Through the first sixteen rounds the board is spaced almost perfectly evenly: about one ranked player for every pick.

Sixty ranked players are packed into an ADP range that runs from 160.4 to 174.8, a span of fourteen and a half picks. Forty-nine of them sit above 165, inside ten picks of each other. Twenty-two are above 170, inside five.

This is what the end of a draft board actually looks like. An ADP of 168.7 and an ADP of 169.6 are the same number with noise on top. Devon Toews, Pyotr Kochetkov, Aaron Ekblad, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Travis Sanheim, Nazem Kadri, Sam Malinski and Owen Tippett occupy 168.7 through 169.6: eight players, nine-tenths of a pick, all three positions.

For the first fifteen rounds the market is telling you something. For the last two it is telling you that it has run out of opinions and these sixty players are interchangeable. If you are drafting in that range, stop reading the board and start reading depth charts.

Who moved this week

In four days, only these of the 219 players actually went anywhere.

Blackwood is the biggest riser on the board, and for once the reason is on the record: Jared Bednar opened camp saying his goaltender had an "incredible" offseason and that Colorado wants him to establish himself as the starter ahead of Scott Wedgewood. Bednar was careful to add that nothing is being handed out. The board moved anyway.

Elias Pettersson (the Vancouver centre, not the defenceman who shares his name) is expected to reprise the first-line centre job under new head coach Manny Malhotra. Michkov arrived at Flyers camp in the final year of his entry-level deal and the local coverage has been about his conditioning and a "different swagger." Byfield opened camp centring Artemi Panarin and Adrian Kempe.

Fiala fell further in four days than anyone else on the board, and he has now fallen 18.2 picks since 30 August. He fractured his left lower leg playing for Switzerland at the Milano-Cortina Olympics in February, missed the rest of last season, and Los Angeles announced on 10 September that he had undergone a further procedure related to the original surgery with no timeline for his return. He will miss the start of camp.

Notice the pair: the Kings' winger falls 7.3 picks and the Kings' centre rises 2.7 in the same four days, on the same injury.

Jarvis skated in a non-contact jersey on the first day of Carolina's camp after surgery on a torn labrum and rotator cuff, is reportedly ahead of schedule, and is still expected to miss roughly the first month. Wilson is the odd one out: he is healthy, he was at the Player Media Tour, and he opened camp on a line with Pierre-Luc Dubois and Alex Tuch. He is thirty-two and the market is cooling on him: 19 picks' worth since 30 August, the largest three-week fall on the board alongside Gavin McKenna.

One player in, three out

Matt Coronato (F, CGY) is the only addition to the board since Tuesday, in at 174.8. He opened camp on Calgary's top line with Matvei Gridin and Morgan Frost.

Three players fell off entirely:

• Troy Terry (F, ANH), last ranked 169.2. He had hip surgery on 9 June with a five-to-six-month timeline, which puts his season debut somewhere between mid-November and mid-December. That has been public since the summer. The board only acted on it when camp opened without him.
• Alex Lyon (G, BUF), last ranked 173.4. Buffalo went into camp planning to split its net rather than name a starter, with Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen and second-year goaltender Colten Ellis in the same conversation. A three-way split is worth less than a backup job.
• Sean Durzi (D, NYR), last ranked 175.1. This one has no visible cause. Durzi arrived in New York this summer and opened camp on the second pair with Marcus Pettersson. He was the last ranked player on Tuesday's board (222nd of 222), and now he is not ranked at all, which given the pile-up described above is roughly a rounding error.

The goalies keep leaving

Since 30 August the ranked pool has gone from 225 players to 220, and the position that has absorbed nearly all of that is goaltending:

Thirty-seven goalies down to thirty-three, and not one goaltender has been added to the board in three weeks. Lyon, Jacob Fowler, Sergei Murashov and Anton Forsberg have all come off it; nobody has replaced them.

The first goalie is Vasilevskiy at 49.3, which means there is no goaltender inside the first forty-eight picks. By pick 50 the board has produced 34 forwards, 16 defencemen and exactly one goalie. By pick 100: 58 forwards, 30 defencemen, 11 goalies.

That is a rational response to a best-ball format where a bad start costs you nothing you can undo. It is close to the opposite of what a roster league wants, where you are starting a goaltender every week, you cannot swap him mid-week, and the position you waited on is the one that decides your Saturday. If you are drafting a keeper or cap league off a best-ball ADP board, the goalie column is the first place that advice stops transferring.

What to do with all this

Opening night is Tuesday 29 September. There are eight days of camp and preseason left to move a market that has already stopped moving.

The top of this board is finished. Twenty-five players have held their positions for three weeks through free agency, signings, and the opening of camp, and nothing in the next eight days is going to reorder them. If your draft is in the first four rounds, ADP is real information and you should use it.

The bottom of it is a coin toss with sixty faces. Ranked player number 161 and ranked player number 220 are separated by fourteen picks of average draft position and, in practice, by nothing at all. That is where camp actually matters: a line rush, a waiver claim or a goalie split is worth more there than the number beside the name.