Players have further developed, more players have reached the NHL, so I updated the data. As a reminder, the main stat that I use for players is the “Point Shares” stat from hockey-reference.com. If there’s a better way to figure this out, I’m all ears but in the years I’ve been doing it, no one has suggested a better alternative.

If you want an explanation of exactly how it all works, it’s right on the home page here at https://www.draft-analysis.com/

Anyway, let’s get into the data. It seems fair to start including 2022 and prior years data. 2022 is still a little early and will change by a lot going forward, but we’ll start with it. As this project started because of the shrieks of Bruins fans about the 2015 draft, this update is from the 2015 to 2022 drafts. I have data for each draft and there is data with each team’s average over that period.

Let’s start with the number most people probably come here to learn. Over Don Sweeney’s tenure as the Boston Bruins GM, through the 2022 draft, the Bruins have gotten the 12th best value out of their drafts. It’s like I tell people, that’s not great, it’s not terrible and it’s far from being “the worst” as many will claim.

For those who want a little more on how I arrived at that, you can read the “How it Works” that I referenced above for the full, deep-dive explanation. But here’s the shorter pitch. The goal of the draft is to take the best available player when it’s your team’s turn to draft. Each player drafted from 2015 to 2022 has a value assigned, the Point Share stat. If you didn’t draft the best player available, you missed out on value. I figure out how much value each team missed by subtracting the best available from the player chosen. I do that for every pick in every draft. Then we add up that missed value and we average it out by the number of players chosen in that draft. Then I took those seven years of drafts and averaged them out by team. Here’s the result:

Team	Total Missed Value	Draft Picks Made	Average Missed Value
New York Rangers	834.98	47	17.77
Ottawa Senators	765.15	43	17.79
St. Louis Blues	695.35	39	17.83
San Jose Sharks	733.70	40	18.34
Minnesota Wild	736.60	40	18.42
Washington Capitals	654.78	35	18.71
Columbus Blue Jackets	637.66	34	18.75
New York Islanders	657.00	35	18.77
Calgary Flames	681.00	36	18.92
Boston Bruins	628.81	33	19.05
Florida Panthers	854.25	44	19.42
Los Angeles Kings	857.93	44	19.50
Tampa Bay Lightning	907.92	46	19.74
Nashville Predators	796.56	40	19.91
Toronto Maple Leafs	1029.22	51	20.18
Montreal Canadiens	1101.14	54	20.39
Vancouver Canucks	848.66	41	20.70
Dallas Stars	764.12	37	20.65
New Jersey Devils	1118.90	54	20.72
Pittsburgh Penguins	683.50	32	21.36
Arizona Coyotes	1027.68	48	21.41
Buffalo Sabres	983.17	45	21.85
Chicago Blackhawks	1146.37	52	22.05
Anaheim Ducks	928.01	42	22.10
Colorado Avalanche	830.73	37	22.45
Carolina Hurricanes	1158.42	51	22.71
Winnipeg Jets	844.60	37	22.83
Detroit Red Wings	1393.53	61	22.84
Edmonton Oilers	890.85	38	23.44
Philadelphia Flyers	1112.27	46	24.18

So how is that possible with such as bad 2015? Here’s how the Bruins did each year:

2015: 29th, only Arizona was worse
2016: 9th, the Bruins got McAvoy, Lindgren and Frederic
2017: 4th, Jeremy Swayman in the 4th round and was the 4th best player in the draft
2018: 19th, Jakub Lauko is the only NHL player, but other teams simply drafted worse
2019: Last. Johnny Beecher only getting 0.5 Point Shares with lots of players after him getting a lot more
2020: 1st. Mason Lohrei. Again, this is all relative to a team’s draft position and it was a pretty weak draft.
2021: 13th, another weak draft where the Bruins will drop over time, unless Lysell catches on in Colorado
2022: 13th, Poitras earning points for the draft but Locmelis and Brunet could make this a better one.

When you average all those out with the other teams, it gets them 12th place. This is objective data with full transparency, anyone can do the same calculations with the same publicly available data.