What Does It Mean To Draft Perfectly? An Evaluation Of Draft Strategy In The National Hockey League

We define what it means for an National Hockey League (NHL) team to have been successful in drafting, and use this retrospective framework to determine if any teams exhibited a sustained edge in drafting from 2000 to 2009. At a high level, we compare actual draft outcomes to teams’ perfect draft outcomes. The perfect draft can be thought of as what would happen if a general manager (GM) could redo a draft with complete knowledge of prospects’ career values as well as other teams’ choices. A prospect’s career value is defined here as aggregate Point Shares (from hockey-reference.com ) through the 2015-16 NHL season, though any valuation metric can be used. When drafting perfectly, a GM picks the best player available as is commonly prescribed, but they start with their last pick and work backwards. This subtle but important distinction alludes to the game theoretic considerations of the draft. Simply put, the best time to pick a good prospect is just before any opponents do. Every year, each team has a different perfect draft value, which is the aggregate career value of their optimal picks. Having more and better picks means more potential value available and a higher perfect draft value. By calculating the percentage of their perfect draft value that a team actually extracts, we now have a simple draft efficiency metric that shows how teams are drafting relative to their best case scenario. This allows us to rank and compare teams equitably by eliminating some of the advantages of having high-value picks

Risk equivalence as an alternative to balancing mean value when trading draft selections and players in major sporting leagues

In sports leagues that use an annual draft to assign eligible players to clubs, having a valueassociated with a draft selection can allow clubs to anticipate future growth of players and, ifa trading period exists, assist negotiations when exchanging draft selections and players.Typically, mean draft values often decline in either an exponential or geometric manner withincreasing draft selection number. Aggregate mean values have been used to comparetrade packages. However, clubs may also want to ensure that a trade does not increase theprobability of obtaining poor players in the draft. This paper therefore considers equivalenceof risk as an alternative trading strategy for club list managers. Here, risk is defined as theprobability of the aggregate value of the received draft selections being below a minimumacceptable level. For risk equivalence, a premium over and above mean market value mayneed to be provided when trading to secure higher draft selections

The Psychology of Athlete Selection: Perceptions and Processes

The objectives of this dissertation were to explore the factors influencing talent wastage within sport and to illuminate areas of improvement for athlete selection practices. To accomplish these objectives the research program used both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Chapter 2 involved a narrative review of the literature to identify factors affecting selection accuracy within and beyond the sport domain. In Chapter 3, a PRISMA-based systematic review was conducted on the literature examining the accuracy of the professional sport draft system in North America. The next two chapters utilized a qualitative design, where the research question, data collection, and data analysis were all guided by a pragmatistic paradigm. More specifically, these chapters explored a group of expert distance running coaches’ subjective beliefs about ‘talent’ (Chapter 4) and talent selection practices (Chapter 5). Finally, in Chapter 6, a tool was developed, and a pilot experiment was conducted to examine the decision-making-behaviour of a group of rugby coaches. Several key findings were revealed through this program of work. Chapter 2 highlighted athlete selection is affected by a complex interaction of various factors. Such factors may include confusing or conflicting beliefs about talent, political and system-wide pressures, and cognitive biases and other decision-making fallibilities. Chapter 3 revealed inefficiencies within the North American draft systems and provided insight into some of the selection challenges at even the most resource-rich stages of the sport pathway. The qualitative analyses showed distance running coaches perceived talent to be complex, nuanced, and easily confused with other closely related terms (Chapter 4) and that coaches made selections using both formal and informal selection strategies that were influenced by their personal and systemic constraints (Chapter 5). Finally, findings presented in Chapter 6 emphasized the difficulties in designing a tool to assess decision-making and selection behaviour in the context of sport. These difficulties are believed to be connected to the individual differences in how ‘success’ is measured and how ‘talent’ is defined and assessed. In summary, findings of this research program suggest talent is a prevalent and pervasive construct that influences the way coaches think about and select athletes

The Psychology of Athlete Selection: Perceptions and Processes

The objectives of this dissertation were to explore the factors influencing talent wastage within sport and to illuminate areas of improvement for athlete selection practices. To accomplish these objectives the research program used both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Chapter 2 involved a narrative review of the literature to identify factors affecting selection accuracy within and beyond the sport domain. In Chapter 3, a PRISMA-based systematic review was conducted on the literature examining the accuracy of the professional sport draft system in North America. The next two chapters utilized a qualitative design, where the research question, data collection, and data analysis were all guided by a pragmatistic paradigm. More specifically, these chapters explored a group of expert distance running coaches subjective beliefs about talent (Chapter 4) and talent selection practices (Chapter 5). Finally, in Chapter 6, a tool was developed, and a pilot experiment was conducted to examine the decision-making-behaviour of a group of rugby coaches. Several key findings were revealed through this program of work. Chapter 2 highlighted athlete selection is affected by a complex interaction of various factors. Such factors may include confusing or conflicting beliefs about talent, political and system-wide pressures, and cognitive biases and other decision-making fallibilities. Chapter 3 revealed inefficiencies within the North American draft systems and provided insight into some of the selection challenges at even the most resource-rich stages of the sport pathway. The qualitative analyses showed distance running coaches perceived talent to be complex, nuanced, and easily confused with other closely related terms (Chapter 4) and that coaches made selections using both formal and informal selection strategies that were influenced by their personal and systemic constraints (Chapter 5). Finally, findings presented in Chapter 6 emphasized the difficulties in designing a tool to assess decision-making and selection behaviour in the context of sport. These difficulties are believed to be connected to the individual differences in how success is measured and how talent is defined and assessed. In summary, findings of this research program suggest talent is a prevalent and pervasive construct that influences the way coaches think about and select athletes