The National Hockey League Entry Draft, 1969-1995: An Application of a Weighted Pool-Adjacent-Violators Algorithm

We use data on the National Hockey League Entry Draft and subsequent performances of the players to predict performance as a function of the player's position, year, and overall rank in the draft. This is done by inequality-constrained least squares using a variation of the pool-adjacent-violators algorithm. The results are used to examine the value of having the ith versus the jth overall pick, the drafting performance of franchises, and the performance of European players. The actual performance of European players drafted in the 1988-1992 period notably exceeded their predicted performance.