The science (or not) of drafting professional hockey players

NHL franchise Colorado Avalanche selected Nathan MacKinnon (centre) as the first pick in the 2013 NHL entry draft – a decision that interests Beedie School of Business associate professor Peter Tingling for more than purely sporting reasons.

Peter Tingling research debunks “Myth of Detroit Red Wings”.

The National Hockey League draft has become something of an annual tradition for Beedie School of Business associate professor Peter Tingling, who found himself in New Jersey recently for the 2013 edition – a scene that attracted leading hockey managers, scouts and media in addition to the players themselves.

Tingling, whose focus on management decision-making makes the high profile sporting event a particularly compelling laboratory, has studied previous NHL entry drafts and says choosing players successfully is less about science and more about guessing right.

Tingling, along with Beedie colleague Michael Brydon, conducted an analysis of NHL draft decisions and subsequent errors in 2011. Their research showed that few teams are able to identify more than two successful career players per year. Further, no team has significantly outperformed any of the others.

“The general point of view seems to be to hope that they are not unlucky in the first round and hope to be lucky in the later rounds,” says Tingling, who has previously studied teams’ spending on innovation and scouting success.

The pair examined the quality of the decisions made by NHL teams during the 1995-2003 entry drafts, and after determining measurements of draft errors, found that player selection “may be influenced by widespread and systematic decision biases.”

“The general advice that we give is to keep track of which scouts have historically made good recommendations (which surprisingly few organizations do), continue to make individual assessments, and to look deeper in the draft,” says Tingling. “Our research shows that even teams that pick late can have a great draft.”

Tingling recently spoke with the Toronto Star about the longstanding reputation of the Detroit Red Wings for consistently outsmarting other teams when picking future hockey all-stars on draft day.

“Our research says nobody is particularly good at making (draft) decisions,” he said. “There’s this myth of Detroit as a great late-round chooser. They do a great job (scouting) in Europe, not so good in North America. But what Detroit is absolutely tremendous at is retaining and developing players. At some point, drafting well is useless if you can’t develop and retain (the players), as many teams know.”

“What teams are really good? The short answer is no team is consistently good. Central Scouting does an amazing job of identifying the first 60, 70 players, maybe 100. After that, it basically flatlines.”