Flames draft history by size

When you have the 35th overall pick of the draft, as the Calgary Flames do, you kind of have a late first round pick, in a way. There are always some players expected to be taken in the first round who fall – and that’s the value of having an early second round pick.

Some of the players to watch out for are guys who would be higher picks, easily, except for the fact that they’re smaller. Vitalii Abramov, Adam Mascherin, Samuel Girard: all possibilities.

They’re also names the Flames likely wouldn’t have picked 10 years ago. Today, the Flames’ best offensive player is listed at 5’9; one of their most anticipated prospects is 5’10. Over the past few seasons, Calgary has opened itself back up to the little guys.

In the context of size, how successful have Flames drafts over the past 10 years?

The Flames went big in this draft, and came away with 74 NHL games to show for it. Dan Ryder is the exception to this draft class, but heavy external factors prevented him from finding NHL success; meanwhile, Matt Pelech was just a terrible pick.

Another largely unsuccessful draft. Bigger players were once again targeted, but none of them really worked out. 

Finally, a draft that yielded a real NHLer. The Flames stuck to players on the bigger side – and even got something of a victory in Keith Aulie – but won with Mikael Backlund. It’s possible this draft could have been even more successful, were it not for the tragedy that befell Mickey Renaud.

Ultimately, though, the Flames pulled the draft off decently enough without targeting any smaller guys, and going after size did have a partial payoff.

The Flames weren’t hurting for height this draft, but they went with a couple of lighter guys. One of them worked out stupendously in T.J. Brodie; one of the bigger guys in Lance Bouma became a solid bottom six player. On the other hand, Greg Nemisz was supposed to be a big power forward, and that did not work out at all. This draft had successes and failures across all sizes.

We’re back to mostly bigger guys: guys who either had the chance to grow into their frames (or, uh, had done so a little too much already). It looks like this draft was mostly unsuccessful though, with only Joni Ortio – one of the smaller guys taken, but automatically special due to the position he plays – holding out any hope for this class.

Considering how the Flames had no picks until the third round, this draft actually turned out pretty decent. There are a fair amount of smaller guys on this list, with Micheal Ferland and Bill Arnold standing out – but so far, Ferland is the only one you could really consider a success, while Arnold still has potential. Everyone else has moved on from the organization.

This was Darryl Sutter’s last draft at the helm.

Enter: Jay Feaster’s drafting, and suddenly, whoa, a significantly smaller draft class. But – and say what you will for three of these guys having since been traded – this is, without a doubt, the most successful class we’ve looked at so far. Three guys on this list have already played 100 games, and their careers are all just getting started.

Does this mean small guarantees success? No. But it’s a hell of a lot better than the previous drafts. Johnny Gaudreau’s physical stats at the time of his drafting were insane – but look at where he is now.

We’re now entering drafts from just a few seasons ago, where it’s mostly too early to truly judge these players. Jon Gillies probably has the best potential of the bunch, and he was the biggest one drafted; however, he’s also a goalie, which is a pretty important difference. Otherwise, this draft looks like it might have some producers – Mark Jankowski and Brett Kulak the bigger hopes on the skater sides – and while Jankowski had a frame to grow into, most of these players were, at the time of their selection, smaller.

This draft is automatically a success because of Sean Monahan: a high pick with both good size and scoring talent; one of those “can’t miss” types of players. He’s far from the biggest of this draft class though; that honour goes to Keegan Kanzig, who is going to be in extremely tough to get a position on the Stockton Heat next season, let alone any NHL dreams. The other two first round picks weren’t particularly big; they’re still works in progress, though.

This was Feaster’s final draft.

Enter: the Brad Treliving era, theorized (by me, at least) to initially be spearheaded by Brian Burke, as Treliving had only had a couple of months on the job at this point. Size was very much the target of this entire draft – except the two smaller players selected, Sam Bennett and Brandon Hickey, are probably the ones with the greatest potential out of this group.

Treliving’s second draft sees a healthy mixture of smaller and bigger players targeted. Andrew Mangiapane and Oliver Kylington are on the smaller side, while Rasmus Andersson is as well but with a fair amount more weight; they’re three extremely bright spots from this draft class. Paverl Karnaukhov and Riley Bruce are less talked about, but they’re the bigger guys of this group.

There isn’t a direct correlation between size and success. Sometimes big picks work out, sometimes they don’t; sometimes small picks work out, sometimes they don’t. There’s very clear evidence of this in the Flames’ draft history, but especially with bigger players. 

Darryl Sutter’s drafts went almost exclusively after bigger prospects, and only yielded four or five actual NHLers to date, depending on your definition of one. That’s an incredibly poor rate of success: one that was corrected almost as soon as the Flames started considering smaller players under new management. The Flames’ 2011 draft is en route to producing as many NHLers as their 2005-2010 drafts combined.

So what does this all mean? Exclusively targeting big players resulted in little success. Tyler Ennis was taken just one pick after Greg Nemisz is a key example. Diversity is crucial: and it’s great that this decade, the Flames have been open to drafting smaller players.

Hopefully we’ll see a range of talent selected in this upcoming draft; hopefully the later rounds will be more like 2015 – open to talent regardless of size – than 2014.