NHL Draft 2019: On Early Recruiting and The Top Players At 16 Not Always Being The Top Players At 18

After being selected in the first round of the 2019 NHL Draft, Ryan Johnson joined an elite group that includes Ryan Poehling, Riley Tufte, Kieffer Bellows, and Brock Boeser.

They are the rare players chosen in the USHL Phase 1 Draft first round who also went in the NHL Draft's first round.

In an age of early recruiting, one of the reasons teams give for getting verbal commitments at 14 and 15 is a need to get the best players. And yet the best players at 15 or 16, when USHL teams select players for the Phase 1 Draft, are not always the top hockey players at 18. There remains plenty of time for development.

In fact, over half of those drafted or tendered by teams in the USHL first round between 2013-2017 (when this year's NHL draft-eligible players were selected) did not end up being drafted by NHL teams even as the number of players with college ties has risen from 56 in 2015 to 71 this weekend.

For every Riley Tufte, who was selected #1 in the 2014 USHL Phase 1 Draft while being committed to UMD, there is a Mitch Lewandowski (MSU), Dominick Mersch (Wisconsin) or Matthew Kiersted (North Dakota), who all were committed to schools and ended up going undrafted by NHL teams.

This weekend's NHL Draft showed something similar. While Johnson (3rd overall in the 2016 USHL Phase 1 Draft) went in the first round, four of the top seven selections ended up being undrafted. (This total includes a pair of Gopher commits in Jake Braccini and Garrett Pinoniemi along with former commit Kaden Bohlsen. Another former commit, Clay Hanus also went undrafted.) The two highest players in the NHL Draft after Johnson, who like Boeser ended up committing to the school he's going to college late, were two of the bottom three first round picks in Robert Mastrosimone and Bobby Brink.

That's far better than 2017 when only three of the 16 players were drafted.

Thankfully, the days of 14 and 15-year-old players committing early has ended thanks in part to new NCAA rules that went into place in May.

A few caveats before showing the math. First, the USHL Phase 1 Draft doesn't include every top American since the USNTDP doesn't participate. That does sway some of the numbers since many top players at 16 (most of whom already made college commitments) head to Ann Arbor; especially in a year like this one where 16 players off the U-18 team were drafted. Including them helps puts the development curve slightly back in place since the team has been consistently putting out first-round picks, but the fact remains that there is plenty of room to develop between 16 and 18.

Second, I chose the USHL Phase 1 Draft because it features players who at the time are committed to college programs and appear to be taking the college route, along with the fact that it shows what players were thought highly. It's not a perfect way to judge. Teams do draft based on who is most likely to show up and play. While there are fliers taken on eventual first round picks in the second or later rounds, it remains a fair way to evaluate. Most of the players drafted in the first round already made college commitments.

Third, just because a top-10 pick wasn't drafted doesn't mean they haven't contributed or become top college hockey players. Lewandowski was the 2017-18 Big Ten Freshman of the Year, chosen over players such as Quinn Hughes and Casey Mittelstadt (both top-10 NHL Draft picks). UMass rising sophomore Ty Farmer, the #2 pick in the 2014 draft after Tufte, played a role in the Minutemen's run to the national championship game.

2019:

1st Round: 1 (Ryan Johnson - 3rd overall in 2017)
2nd Round: 2
3rd Round: 2
4th Round: 1
5th Round: 2
Undrafted: 8
#1 Overall Not Drafted

2018:

3rd Round: 1
4th Round: 3
6th Round: 3 (2 of top 3)
7th Round: 1
Undrafted: 8
2016 #1 overall Gavin Hain was a 6th round pick by Philadelphia

2017:

1st Round: 1 (Ryan Poehling #1)
3rd Round: 2 (Clayton Phillips #9, Reilly Walsh #14)
Undrafted: 13

2016:

1st Round: 2 (Riley Tufte #1 and Kieffer Bellows)
3rd Round: 1
5th Round: 1
7th Round: 1
Undrafted: 11

Note: One undrafted player, Hugh McGing, was drafted in his third year of eligibility.

2015:

1st Round: 2 (Brock Boeser at #4 and Ivan Provorov at #5)
3rd Round: 3 (Tommy Novak, Brent Gates Jr., and Rem Pitlick)
Undrafted: 10
2015 #1 overall was a tendered player who went undrafted. The top non-tendered player was Novak.

Note: Another tendered player, Denis Smirnov, went undrafted in his first year of eligibility before being drafted in his second.

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