Photo by user “Tsyp9”, via Wikimedia Commons.
At Hockey-Graphs, we like to provide data-based answers to questions. It’s what we do. But it’s also good to recognize issues in the analytics world that haven’t yet been addressed. Sometimes that’s the case because we don’t have the data we need available, and sometimes it’s because the question has yet to be properly framed. It’s important to know what we don’t know, and to talk about it regardless.
There has been some great draft work done at our site and elsewhere in the last few years, and one of the findings has been the volatility of drafting defensemen relative to forwards. Couple that with claims that forwards have more of an impact on shot rates than defensemen, and one would be tempted to claim that avoiding defensemen altogether would be a solid draft strategy (though I’ll note that most analysts think this is taking the conclusion too far).
Hockey Graphs 
