Analyzing the results of the 2025 NHL Entry Draft
Oops! All 6'4"+ Defensemen Edition
After a lengthy Day 1, Day 2 thankfully went a bit faster than expected and with that, the 2025 NHL Entry Draft was in the books. In this follow-up, we will take a look at some of the immediate takeaways from the Draft.
First off, revisiting our Pundit Analysis, it is yet another year where Sam Cosentino’s draft ranking is closest to the actual draft order:
For context, “Average Off-By” is a pick-weighted measure of how close a ranking was to the actual draft order, with “Unweighted Off-By” being an unweighted measure. This means that players on Cosentino’s ranking were ordered on average just 5.23 spots from where they were taken. Or, when weighting for accuracy in earlier rounds, just 3.51 spots off.
The weighted measure tends to favor longer rankings, and the unweighted measure tends to favor shorter rankings. This has been a really intriguing trend, where Sam Cosentino’s ranking trends closer to the actual draft order than any other ranking, does it almost every year, and blows it out of the water in both measures. Shane Malloy’s HockeyProspect Radio does come a bit closer this year than others have, but its Cosentino doing it again. Now, what does this actually mean? Not a whole lot in the long scheme of things, but its a part of the analysis on who the best rankings may be. In this instance, we can infer that the closer a ranking is to the actual draft order, the closer their opinion is to that of NHL GMs and scouts.
At the opposite end of the list, we see some of the rankings that had the hottest takes in this draft:
Only time will tell if they were smarter than everyone else, or had just lost the plot this year.
Moving on to how teams did this draft. First off, let’s take a look that, when all was said and done, which teams had the best pools of picks:
Here we have three separate measures of pick quality. The first, Picks vs Pick Pos, is a simple metric that tracks which teams have the most picks at the best pick position.
The second, Pick Value Sum, is the sum of pick values using Dom Luszczyszyn’s Pick Value Chart. This chart heavily favors 1st Overall, so the Islanders naturally retain the most-valuable set of picks with this measure. The third, Expected # of Players, is a measure of how many 200GP+ NHL players a team should expect from their group of picks, all things being equal. Because of Pittsburgh’s bounty of picks, they should expect to get at least four NHLers out of this draft, with a 5% chance of a 5th. We can use this as an approximate metric for whether or not a team has outperformed or underperformed their draft picks later on down the line.
Next up, how much value did each team generate in the draft? That is what we will examine in our next chart:
Here we are tracking several different metrics - each team’s number of picks, the average draft position of their picks, the average rank of the player’s they’ve drafted, and how much they reached or a player fell with their picks. The final column takes in the number of picks, the ranking of each of their picks, and compares that with the position of each of their picks to generate a Draft Value Score. This is intended to measure how much value each team generated with their picks relative to the sentiment of the pundits. This metric by that nature tends to favor teams that perform well in later rounds as well as teams with large sums of picks.
The Islanders, with 1st Overall and two additional 1st-round picks, take the cake here. Not only that, they nailed some falling players in later rounds - pundits had favorable opinions on nearly every player they selected, relative to the pick used to select them. The Islanders simply did not take any fliers on unranked or poorly-ranked prospects.
Next up is surprisingly the Los Angeles Kings, in second place. Much like the Islanders, they did not select any unranked or poorly-ranked players. In particular, the selections of Will Sharpe, Brendan McMorrow, and especially Jan Chovan late into the draft were seen as excellent value adds. Petteri Rimpinen at 152 and even Jimmy Lombardi at 125 were also seen as positive selections.
In third were the Penguins, who added a lot of value simply by drafting thirteen players, the most in a draft since Carolina took the same amount in 2021. They did well in their selections of Charlton Trethewey, Ryan Miller, and Quinn Beauchesne, but less-so in taking guys like Peyton Kettles, Gabriel D’Aigle and Travis Hayes earlier than expected.
Coming in last was the Vegas Golden Knights. Not only did they have only four picks, but two of those picks were incredibly off the board. Alex Weiermair was ranked by a single pundit at 296, and Gustav Sjoqvist went unranked across all sources. That said, I personally did like their pickup of Ihs-Wozniak in the late second, as well as Mateo Nobert at 85th overall, so there is still a chance they may get a player out of this draft. Nevertheless, those pickups were not enough to beat out the lack of perceived value generated by the selections of Weiermair and Sjoqvist.
Some final thoughts as the NHL Draft Weekend comes to an end -
This was yet another year where the scouts seem to be favoring bigger and bigger prospects. While only 49.3% of players ranked were 6’1” or taller in height, over 63% of drafted players fell in into that range. Just 17.49% of players drafted were under 6’ tall. While this is not as extreme as 2024, in which 66.82% of drafted players were 6’1” or taller, 2024 as a whole was also a bigger draft, size-wise. I expect we will see this size trend continue for at least another few years.
As to whether or not its a successful strategy remains to be seen, though we have seen teams try and follow this idea in the past. The 2017 Detroit Red Wings’ had the “Size Draft”, in which they heavily favored the biggest players they could take, from 6’6” Michael Rasmussen at 9th Overall to 6’8” Malte Setkov at 100th overall. This draft turned out to be one of the worst for the Red Wings’ rebuild and arguably set them back a year or two as they passed on higher-ranked players like Nick Suzuki, Jason Robertson, and Mikey Anderson in favor of a bigger, grittier, more defensive crop of players that ultimately failed to pan out. From their selection of 11 players, only Rasmussen remains with the organization.
Are the monster, truculent defensive defensemen of this draft in Simon Wang, Jacob Rombach, Carter Amico, Peyton Kettles, Max Psenicka, Sean Barnhill, and others going to all pan out into Top-6 defensive defensemen? Will any of them find a modicum of offensive upside? I cannot help but think back to the days when this archetype was all the rage in the first round of the Draft. Guys like Ty Wishart, Keaton Ellerby, Alex Plante, Colton Teubert, Dylan McIlrath, and Griffin Reinhart all dazzled scouts with their size, grit, and defensive play. And yet, they all struggled to translate their success at the junior level to the NHL. Of course the knock on many of them at the time was their skating ability, which does not seem to be the case for these prospects, many are billed as smooth skating, agile defensemen for their size.
Are we going to be entering an era of the NHL in 10 years where teams’ defense comprise of herculean defensemen all over 6’3” in height shutting down opposition offense with their size and reach, or is this just another case of trend-chasing in NHL scouting where teams are still hoping to find the next coming of Chris Pronger or Victor Hedman? Time will tell, but I would bet its the latter.
One more thought, before I disappear for another 11 months, I would like to take a quick look at some of the best talent left on the board at the conclusion of the draft, and muse as to why they may have been forgotten:
Tomas Pobezal - 5’9/178lbs center out of HK Nitra in Slovakia, he was ranked at an average of 76.56 by 18 sources. A September birthday player, he spent the entire year in Slovakia men’s league where he put up good numbers, and will be playing in the OHL next year. Likely a victim of the size mentality, as there seems to have been enough here to warrant spending a later pick on. I bet this kid goes and puts up a point per game or better in the OHL next year and is in significant redraft conversations in 2026.
Dakoda Rheaume-Mullen - 6’/182lbs defenseman, ranked at an average of 84.57 by 21 sources. spent the entire season at University of Michigan. If the name sounds familiar, he is indeed the son of Manon Rheaume. Frankly a shocker to me that he went undrafted. Unless there is a personality issue here, difficult to see why a team would not even spend a 6th or 7th rounder on the kid. I will let this image do the talking:
Luka Radivojevic - 5’9/165lbs defenseman, played with the Muskegon Lumberjacks in the USHL, ranked at an average of 86.60 by 20 sources. Given that ZERO defensemen under 6’ in height were drafted this year, likely another victim of the Size Draft mentality.
Reese Hamilton - 6’0/172lbs defenseman with the Regina Pats of the WHL. he was ranked at an average of 94.33 by 18 sources. Hamilton had an excellent D-1 campaign with the Calgary Hitmen and was expected to be among the better players available. However he was traded from a strong Calgary squad after registering just 3 points in 20 games to the frankly terrible Regina Pats, where he would score just 11 points in 39 games while racking up a -20. Without personal viewings, hard to say if these numbers were the result of being on a bad team, or Hamilton just had a bad year. I’d keep an eye on him for a potential rebound campaign next season.
Bruno Osmanis - 5’11/170lbs right winger, ranked at an average of 96.95 across 19 sources. As high as 41 and as low as 227, the opinions on Osmanis were considerably-split, but at the end of the day, he was still ranked by a considerable amount of sources. He split time between J20 and HockeyAllsvenskan, putting up 37 points in 31 games with IF Bjorkloven’s J20 squad 7 points in 27 games Allsvenskan. Those are pretty good numbers for an 18-year old splitting time, and any time you have a chance to pick up someone putting up a considerable number of minutes in Swedish men’s league in their draft year, its a pretty decent bet, especially when there are teams drafting kids out of J18 Region, which is a league with an extremely, extremely low success rate for players drafted out of it at 18. As for my conjecture Osmanis likely fell off the board due to his size, like many others. And like Hamilton, I would keep an eye on Osmanis as a potential re-entry candidate for next year’s draft as it seems likely he will be with IF Bjorkloven’s men’s team full time next year.
That is all for this year! I will now retreat back into the darkness, and hope to emerge sometime next year with another draft sheet. Until then, thank you for reading my amateur hockey nonsense, I hope you found it informative and thought-provoking or, at the very least, somewhat entertaining.
Really interesting article - thanks for assembling this info!
‘Draft value score’ - Is there a reasonably simple way to weight this (likely using same weighting as the preceding graph)? Drafting a seventh rounder in the fifth round may be a reach, but isn’t particularly important. But drafting a second rounder 1st overall would be a major loss.
Somewhat interestingly you could weight this in either direction - by pick position value or by providing an expected value of the players based on what their ranking value indicates. As I’m playing with the idea in my head I like the latter - as it could reflect the variance between a McKenna and a Schaefer or player tiers more broadly.