The work of Charles A. Dana Professor of Statistics Michael Schuckers was used in a recent article by 'The Athletic' about how to determine whether a National Hockey League draft class is strong or not.
In the article titled, "NHL Draft Depth: When should a draft class be labeled good - or bad?", the author, Corey Pronman, uses Schuckers' Draft Pick Value Chart from 2016 to evaluate the success or failure of draft prospects. While traditional methods of evaluation have included looking at games played or counting statistics like points, Schuckers' work instead focused on a player's ice time over his first seven years in the NHL.
Pronman decided to examine the NHL drafts from 2004 to 2009, and his analysis shows that the draft value curve Schuckers developed in his work does match with what he saw when looking at the successes and failures of those drafts. Now he intends to use this evaluation process as he puts together his rankings for the upcoming 2020 draft.
"For the purposes of this article, I'm going to use ice time as my metric of success. The reason why is it takes into account how much the coach trusts a player offensively and defensively," says Pronman. "Why does this matter? Context. It's important to understand what a draft tends to look like."
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For years, Schuckers has been working with numerous St. Lawrence students interested in sports analytics for years, including several independent research projects. He has also played a pivotal role in the development of a two-day Ottawa Hockey Analytics Conference, co-hosted by St. Lawrence University and Carleton University, which has featured workshops, speakers, and panel discussions since its inaugural event in 2017.
Learn more about St. Lawrence's Department of Math, Computer Science, and Statistics.
