A link to this was posted in the ramblings this morning and I really thought it deserved a thread of it's own. What a brilliant piece of work! For those who missed it the link is here:
My only complaint is that you can't group draft years in an effort to weed out the 60's, 70's and a large part of the 80's drafts where teams really weren't looking overseas (ie. hard to compare apples to apples). It makes it more difficult to tease out the international drafting trends between an original 6 team and a more recent expansion franchise like Nashville.
Anyway, I've been skimming through it looking for trends that stand out and here are a few off the cuff thoughts:
Anaheim look everywhere for their prospects (US, WHL, OHL, SEL, QMJHL, etc). Big international drafting trend.
Calgary follows a similar distribution to Anaheim (they like their Swedes)
Carolina seem big on drafting kids out of the US and avoid Russians like the plague.
Colorado might just draft the most US kids of anyone other than SJ
Dallas has a very international flavour to their drafting but don't seem to favour any particular nation
Surprise, surprise Detroit likes drafting out of Sweden
Edmonton seems to focus heavily on Canadians and largely on the WHL
Minnesota seem to have a thing for the Finns and LOVE drafting out of the WHL
Is anyone surprised Montreal look almost exclusively to the Q?
Nashville is all over the map. These guys will go anywhere for a prospect.
NJ won't hesitate to draft a Russian
The Sens are similar to Nashville and will take their prospects from anywhere they can get them
Pittsburgh keeps their focus in NA and almost exclusively on the OHL and WHL
SJ loves what they're seeing in the US. Their drafting verges on the fanatical!
TBay has an official love affair with Russians....wow!
The more I look at this the more I want to see what the drafting trends are from about the mid 90's on are. It's really difficult to see what's going on with the original six teams as their draft curves are so heavily NA the overseas component becomes a blip.
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