from Fluto Shinzawa of the Boston Globe,

Michael Schuckers acknowledges he has not discovered the foolproof method of drafting future NHLers. No such solution exists.

If Schuckers had uncovered something to this degree, he would be claiming ownership not just of the pending Las Vegas franchise but all of the city’s casinos.

Instead, Schuckers, professor of statistics at St. Lawrence University, is a proponent of marginal gains. It is the approach that guided his authorship of “Draft by Numbers: Using Data and Analytics to Improve National Hockey League Player Selection.”

The paper, which Schuckers presented at the 2016 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, details Schuckers’s creation of a model that examined two clusters of players: those drafted from 1998 to 2002, and prospects taken between 2004 and 2008. Schuckers’s “Draft by Numbers” model predicted NHL performance for players drafted within each set.

Schuckers used games played and time on ice for a player’s first seven NHL years as performance benchmarks.

continue plue other topics including the Blackhawks, Penguins and Jets...