Drafting in the National Hockey League is in many ways a crap-shoot. Teams gawk at teenagers from afar for 12 months, chat them up here and there, and generally attempt to gather as much useful information as they possibly can. Then they choose players for seven rounds and cross their fingers that some of them turn out.
A couple years ago, TSN’s Scott Cullen conducted an examination of draft picks to determine the expected value of picks. More precisely, how likely was it that a selection would be successful? Given the expected values of the various draft picks, how well have the Flames done recently when compared to those expected values?