Todd Button....

[gvitaly]

The draft has gotten much better under Teliving, and the Flames have managed to get a lot of diamonds in the rough in recent years.
We got Fox(3rd), Gaudreau(4th), Pospisil(4th), Kulak(4th), Ruzicka(4th), Ferland(5th), Mangiapane(6th), Wolf(7th), Solovyov(7th)

Peole don't realize that even 2nd round picks like Andersson, Dube, and Kylington have about a 10% chance of hitting.

Does it mean I like everything he's doing? No! I think we have had a big hole in our European and Russian scouting. The lack of Russians drafted was noticable for a long time. Also the whiffs on Ronni, and potentially Honzek seem significant.

Moreover, this organization absolutely sucked at picking goalies at the draft before Wolf(McDonald ahead of Demko anyone?)

[Parallex]

Originally Posted by dustygoon

I am curious why Todd Button has been head of scouting for so long. He was head under Sutter, Feaster, Burke, Tre and now Conroy.

Here's the thing... it's really hard to guage his performance as head of scouting. I mean sure you can look at what's been produced via the draft but ultimately Button isn't the one making the choices, it's management. He can supply them with his opinions, he can make his own rankings, and help compile a board but that means nothing if the guy walking up to the podium doesn't say the next name up.

There are other things to consider to... we don't know what his marching orders were. I mean let's say that Burke went up to him and said "I want the biggest snarliest snarls who ever did truculat!"... As a good employee Button would go out and compile a list based on that directive. That that list is unlikely to produce as good a draft as a neutral one that didn't have that directive wouldn't be on Button.

Really the Front Office as a whole (Button included) has to be judged on that to share in the outcome.

[saillias]

I think he predates Sutter, right? He became Head of Scouting under Craig Button? There's been debates about his competence as long as I've been on the internet. At some point everyone decides he must have really good rankings and Flames failed picks must be the fault of management meddling and inserting their own bias. Or that he has compromising information on everyone in this org

[Bonded]

The 2018 draft alone will majorly skew this against the Flames where they had no pick until the 4th round. They also didn't have a 2nd round pick though 2017-2019.

Alternatively, adding in 2016 adds in 1296 games for the Flames.

Great example of using data to get a result you want. I am not sure how it flows for the other teams on the list but you can make the Flames look even worse by starting in 2018 or way better by starting in 2016.

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by saillias

I think he predates Sutter, right? He became Head of Scouting under Craig Button? There's been debates about his competence as long as I've been on the internet. At some point everyone decides he must have really good rankings and Flames failed picks must be the fault of management meddling and inserting their own bias. Or that he has compromising information on everyone in this org

He became director of scouting or head scout 1 year after Craig Button was hired as GM. He was an amateur scout with the Flames for 3 years before Craig Button was hired.

Crazy that Tod Button's overall tenure with the Flames goes back to Al Coates.

[Buff]

Originally Posted by saillias

I think he predates Sutter, right? He became Head of Scouting under Craig Button? There's been debates about his competence as long as I've been on the internet. At some point everyone decides he must have really good rankings and Flames failed picks must be the fault of management meddling and inserting their own bias. Or that he has compromising information on everyone in this org

I saw something a year or two ago that he was entering his 25th year in the organization. He started sometime in the 90s as a scout. So Craig may have promoted him to head of scouting but he even predated Craig by quite a few years too! He's been involved with the Flames for a long time.
Quick google comes up with this: https://theathletic.com/2722077/2021...t-preparation/ free to read too!

[Strange Brew]

Originally Posted by YyjFlames

Yeah, I agree there wasn't a ton of opportunity under the previous coach (how Sutter handled Pelletier and even Phillips as small as he was was really poor) -- I just don't think that Zary's time in the minors hurt him and I don't think that, other than during the Sutter years and a year or two where management thought they were in a place to win, Treleving was against young players stepping in to play.

He just didn't have a lot of young players ready to take the step because he traded so many high picks. I also agree with your broader point that the scouting staff has been really fantastic with what they were given for picks.

As an aside on Valimaki, it wasn't a lack of opportunity, but the guy was injured so much during his development time and then he wasn't a top 6 d-man when he was healthy enough to get a shot. Was it wrong to send him down? Sure, him getting picked up by Arizona for free was a bad result, but him eating popcorn as a number 7 in the NHL just to protect his rights wouldn't have been good for the player or the team.

I don't know how much we can say that Sutter 2.0 as coach held back young players.

Duehr, Ruzicka, Kylington all seemed to do rather well under him.
Phillips sure doesn't look like an NHLer.
Maybe Pelletier could have played more but I might argue he was developing fairly well before the change to Huska and this injury year.

Valimaki maybe. Good or bad, his coaching yielded no results from Valimaki at all.

[dustygoon]

The analysis is rough as i said. Each pick needs weighting to make this accurate. And the starting year (2017 in my case) needs to be litigated....it's totally arbitrary. And we should do all 32 teams.

Someone said use median instead of mean. That isn't going to be relevant if you think through that. For example, you have three picks....first pick is 2nd rounder that plays 245 games, then 4th rounder with 2 games, and 6th rounder with 7 games. Median is 7.

The analysis is directionally correct i think or at least is cause for concern.

As for if this is on Todd Button? He is head of scouting. The GM has a say on the list which goes to 60-70 and is exhausted by end of 3rd round i think? After the list? It's area scouts. That's Todd's realm. He leads this. And as rough as my numbers are.....it's enough to question him.

[edslunch]

Originally Posted by Fan69

No disrespect intended but i see a bit of a fundamental flaw. For our last two draft unless we had been picking top five its not reasonable to expect many picks to have played many games?

I think with the recency bias out it would look a little clearer unless im missing something?

Yeah, I think there needs to be factors for draft year and draft position to make things halfway comparable. As far as making qualifications based on management decisions or other intangibles, I would guess many teams could add asterisks to their draft records based on something out of the scouts' control, but man does Calgary look like a bit of a management train wreck in hindsight.

[Bonded]

Originally Posted by dustygoon

The analysis is rough as i said. Each pick needs weighting to make this accurate. And the starting year (2017 in my case) needs to be litigated....it's totally arbitrary. And we should do all 32 teams.

Someone said use median instead of mean. That isn't going to be relevant if you think through that. For example, you have three picks....first pick is 2nd rounder that plays 245 games, then 4th rounder with 2 games, and 6th rounder with 7 games. Median is 7.

The analysis is directionally correct i think or at least is cause for concern.

As for if this is on Todd Button? He is head of scouting. The GM has a say on the list which goes to 60-70 and is exhausted by end of 3rd round i think? After the list? It's area scouts. That's Todd's realm. He leads this. And as rough as my numbers are.....it's enough to question him.

If changing the start date of your analysis by a single year drastically skews the results then there isn't much direction to glean. All it really points out to me is that Flames traded way too many draft picks.

Obviously way to much work but the real analysis would be over Button's entire tenure compared to league taking into account round weightings.

[Calgary4LIfe]

I think there are a few things. As others have mentioned, weighting of the picks should bring more clarity. Also, those other teams listed had many more open spots available to players than Calgary has due to their timing. I would bet that if you go back to 2013 rather than 2017, Calgary would look better there as they were in the rebuild/coming out of one. Those teams had more recent 'rebullds/retools', which certainly allows for more prospects to get into games.


This is not a complete list, and I purposefully tried to avoid "Player for player" movement like Hamilton for Hanifin, but did include Lindholm because Ferland went the other way who was a Flames pick. I am sure I missed a lot, and this information is probably not 100% correct, but it probably serves the purpose to illustrate how many games were taken by fringe players traded for, signed as UFAs or signed as CHL/College/Euro players. Some trades/signings were great, others poor. Some were to fill a legitimate hole in the lineup that didn't have any player ready, but that takes much more time and makes things more arbitrary, at least in many cases.


Players brought in through trades:

Brett Ritchie, Nick Ritchie, Ryan Carpenter, Calle Jarnkrok, Tyler Pitlick, Erik Gustafsson, Derek Forbort, Oscar Fatenberg, Nick Shore, Dalton Prout, and Jyrki Jokipakka, Alex Chiasson (2016 trade, but was on the team in 2017 too), Michael Stone, Curtis Lazar, Chris Stewart (waivers), Hamonic, Hamilton, Lucic, Zadorov, Toffoli, Stecher, Okhotyuk, Schwindt, Huberdeau, Weegar, Lindholm


Players signed as UFAs - some of these didn't move the needle at all, while others were good. Either way, they will block a player from graduating. Some were brought in prior to 2017, but played at least through the 2017-18 season, thus affecting the GPs of prospects. It doesn't necessarily mean that with each signing that a prospect did get blocked, but it is safe to assume that many players ended up with lower GPs since 2017: Frolik, Versteeg, Brouwer, Wideman, Engelland, Freddie Hamilton, Bartkowski, Grossman, Vey, Hrivik, Glass, Ryan, Jagr, Neal, Czarnik, Quine, Rychel, Peluso, Rieder, Rinaldo, Robinson, Yelesin, Davidson, Leivo, Ritchie, Nordstrom, Nesterov, Froese, Simon, Coleman, Gudbranson, Lewis, Richardson, Kadri, Gilbert, Rooney, Desimone, Zohorna (waivers), Greer (waivers), Hanley (waivers), Pachal (waivers), Oesterle,



College/CHL/European Free Agent signings:
Hathaway, Foo, Giordano, Mackey, Gawdin, Duehr, Klapka,



Those are a lot of player that have either taken the spots of young prospects. For instance, Kylington basically didn't play an entire year as he was in the special covid 5 player callup/isolation (or whatever it was called), and when he did become a regular, Gustafsson and Forbort were brought in and it pushed him out of the lineup again, and neither one of those moved the needle.



Did the other teams have a GM more like Treliving who seemed to prefer signing UFAs and making trades to fill holes, or more like Conroy who wanted to keep spots open? Were those teams in win-now modes where it becomes harder for prospects to get positions on the team, or were they recent rebuilds in that time-frame where spots are easier for prospects to grab? Were the prospects too slow in developing or not good enough so that Treliving had to find alternative players, or was it a mistake on Treliving's part to do so? Either way, every player brought onto the Flames from outside of the Flames own draft picks will have taken games away from their own drafted players.



It does become more difficult to analyze fairly. You almost have to really track the progress of picks and see where the team is on the compete vs rebuild timeline, and see how good the manager was, and how fair the coach was...



Other models have shown that based on where the Flames have picked, they have done very well on those picks. Dallas is being thrown about as an elite drafting team, but go through hockeydb and look through their draft history and Calgary's draft history. Their best ever draft from 2017 is probably not as good as Calgary's draft from 2016 - or at least it is arguable. Since then, Dallas has looked average, though Stankoven MAY end up changing that, but Calgary also has good players pushing through. It definitely does become interesting.


All in all, I do believe that Calgary has done an excellent job of drafting and developing players, and they probably haven't leveraged this enough in the recent past. I am hoping that Conroy really leverages this instead of trading picks, at least for the next 4-5 seasons at least.

[Boreal]

Originally Posted by dustygoon

I am curious why Todd Button has been head of scouting for so long. He was head under Sutter, Feaster, Burke, Tre and now Conroy. He's had some great picks.

There are so many ways to gauge effectiveness of scouts. To do a quick and dirty analysis, I went back, picked a few middle of the road teams (in my opinion) and looked at drafting from 2017 to now. I could have picked any year, but wanted recency. I don't care about late blooming utility guys drafted 10 years ago. I think scouts need to identify talent that can get up the curve quickly and have an impact early in their careers before earning huge contracts.

My metric: TOTAL GAMES PLAYED BY ALL PICKS / NUMBER OF DRAFT PICKS = GAMES PLAYED PER PICK

I excluded top 5 picks because they should be no brainers. Obviously there should be some weighting for higher picks vs lower picks, but i don't have time.

It doesn't look great. Flames average 14 games played per draft pick we made since 2017. Dallas 23. LA 30. Wild second worst in this list at 17.



I know the analysis isn't perfect, but directionally am I wrong?

Conroy talked about Tod when he was hired. He has been behind the scenes & knows it’s about luck as much as skill.

He mentioned in more than one draft the Flames had elite players in later rounds picked right before or close to their selection. Finding Gaudreau is evidence of his ability, but there were other that barely missed.

He didn’t mention it, but when you read between the lines was as close as it gets to being selected in 2015 in particular.

If that selection happened Treliving is likely still here. Instead the team ended up with Pavel Karnaukhov.

He knows Tod’s ability to evaluate talent is elite, now it’s up to him to use it with his own talent evaluation, development, & roster construction.

[YyjFlames]

Originally Posted by Strange Brew

I don't know how much we can say that Sutter 2.0 as coach held back young players.

Duehr, Ruzicka, Kylington all seemed to do rather well under him.
Phillips sure doesn't look like an NHLer.
Maybe Pelletier could have played more but I might argue he was developing fairly well before the change to Huska and this injury year.

Valimaki maybe. Good or bad, his coaching yielded no results from Valimaki at all.

Kylington went on mental health leave and Ruzicka was so inconsistent and far from a success during his years. Phillips has been debated to death, but although he doesn't look like an NHLer, he earned an opportunity in the AHL to get some real time in the NHL but he wasn't given that opportunity in Calgary. Duehr was a Sutter-style grinder and succeeded under his system (if 27 games is a success).

Maybe the distinction is that he wouldn't give young skill guys an opportunity.

I'm not blaming Sutter for Valimaki. Valimaki's development broke down before Sutter came in and he didn't look like a top 6 defenceman in the training camp before he was put on waivers.

And personally, I was excited to see Sutter brought in as I thought the team needed a tough nose kick in the butt to get things going. His handling of the younger players really turned me off him this round, particularly when they needed the energy that a young guy could bring.

[Macho0978]

Originally Posted by YyjFlames

Yeah, I agree there wasn't a ton of opportunity under the previous coach (how Sutter handled Pelletier and even Phillips as small as he was was really poor) -- I just don't think that Zary's time in the minors hurt him and I don't think that, other than during the Sutter years and a year or two where management thought they were in a place to win, Treleving was against young players stepping in to play.

He just didn't have a lot of young players ready to take the step because he traded so many high picks. I also agree with your broader point that the scouting staff has been really fantastic with what they were given for picks.

As an aside on Valimaki, it wasn't a lack of opportunity, but the guy was injured so much during his development time and then he wasn't a top 6 d-man when he was healthy enough to get a shot. Was it wrong to send him down? Sure, him getting picked up by Arizona for free was a bad result, but him eating popcorn as a number 7 in the NHL just to protect his rights wouldn't have been good for the player or the team.

I agree on Valimaki but that isn't on Button. Really maybe isn't on the team either, just some bad luck.

This is why I'm ok trading some picks for young players. You can have too many picks and prospects at once and you could have late bloomers buried behind players, never get a crack and end up excelling on a different team.

I use Zary as the example, he was not being labeled to be this good by almost everyone. We all had Pelletier ahead as well as Coronato. Lots were disappointed when we drafted him, why did we trade down. He played well in the AHL, but nothing said he would be in the discussion of rookie of the year.

He so far is looking better than most projected. Maybe it will be a one off and he won't continue to grow, but teams that never give guys a crack don't get these surprises. That isn't on Button.

[CSharp]

It's hard to get good draft picks or even good prospects when the teams for the last 10-15 years have been fluctuating between mediocrity of missing the playoffs by a few points, to just making it in, or near the top. When you're stuck in mediocrity constantly and wanting to make the playoffs, the past GM's would rather give away those low end picks for something more tangible to bolster the playoff hopes. I think the only GM's that actually had the balls to sink as low as possible for rebuilding was Feaster and it sucked that Tre had to come in and decided that the rebuild is over. This team had 2 great opportunities on generational drafts and wasted them. Guess we'll see if Conroy has learned from the past. He's definitely in the right direction this past season, albeit one season too late.

[HighLifeMan]

Starting it in 2017 just isn't fair for Tod Button as he was given just 1 draft pick in the top 100 over two consecutive drafts at the start of that sample size.

Add in the 2015/2016 draft classes and it changes things dramatically from a Flames perspective.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Button has been Director of Scouting since 2000-01. So I decided to look at the first team on HockeyDB for comparison. Surprisingly they have had almost the same number of picks during Button's window (2001 on). I did not include the last two drafts because players have not really started to work their way into the NHL yet.

Anaheim (48/154 - .311 batting average)

Top players: Ryan Getzlaf (1157), Corey Perry (1311), Bobby Ryan (866), Justin Schultz (745), Sami Vatanan (473), Kyle Palmeri (818), Cam Fowler (974), William Carlsson (685), John Gibson (477), Richard Rakell (721), Hampus Lindholm (745), Frederick Andersen (495), Shea Theodore (497), Trevor Zegras (211), Jamie Drysdale (147)

Role players: Stansislov Chistov (196), Martin Gerber (229), PA Parenteau (491), Tim Brent (207), Joffrey Lupul (701), Shane O'Brien (537), Drew Miller (571), Ladislav Smid (538), Tim Brent (207), Brendan Mikkelson (131), Matt Beleskey (477), Eric Tangradi (150), Steven Kampfer (231), Jake Gardiner (645), Brandon MacMillian (171), Peter Holland (266), Emerson Etem (173), Devante Smith-Pelly (395), Chris Wagner (373), Josh Manson (578), Jaycob Megna (185), Nick Ritchie (481), Marcus Petterson (444), Brandon Montour (520), Ondrej Kase (258), Jacob Larsson (172), Troy Terry (350), Max Jones (258), Sam Steel (339), Josh Mahura (191), Maxime Comtois (211), Isaac Lundestrom (258), Mason MacTavish (153)

versus

Calgary (29/153 - .189 batting average)

Top players: Dion Phaneuf (1048), TJ Brodie (908), Johnny Gaudreau (763), Sean Monahan (764), Rasmus Andersson (455), Matthew Tkachuk (590), Adam Fox (357)

Role players: Chuck Kobasew (601), David Moss (501), Curtis McElhinney (249), Eric Nystrom (593), Matthew Lombardi (536), Brandon Prust (486), Dustin Boyd (220), Adam Pardy (342), Adam Cracknell (210), Lance Bouma (357), Michael Ferland (355), Sven Baertschi (292), Markus Granlund (335), Laurent Brossoit (140), Mark Jankowski (354), Brett Kulak (498), Sam Bennett (615), Oliver Kylington (201), Andrew Mangiapane (417), Dillon Dube (325), Adam Ruzicka (117) Juuso Valimaki (228)

Some may say that Anaheim has had a positional advantage in the draft, drafting earlier more often, but they have had more peaks and valleys than the Flames. The average draft position for Calgary is 120 versus 104 for Anaheim. Anaheim drafts a little earlier on average but hits all over the draft with more consistency.

I don't see Calgary getting better or having better drafts. What I see is recency bias coming to the fore and giving the impressions the Flames are better. Remember the excitement over the 2021 draft and all the great young talent we scooped up? Yeesh, that was ugly in retrospect. It's not all Button's fault, but I definitely think the Flames performance at the draft table has not been near as good as people are suggesting or trying to build up. I think it is easy to see why one team has won a cup and the other has not.

[Freeway]

Tod (one D) was named Director of Scouting in 2000-01, but really only focused on amateur after the trade deadline, and he and Mike Sands both worked on the drafting process. He became a full-time amateur scout in 2005-06 and became the full overseer of the draft in 2010 after Sands left the organization.


There's a book out right now that has an entire chapter dedicated to Button's impact on the organization.

[Delthefunky]

Originally Posted by Boblobla

I would weight it differently, maybe add a multiplier for the round. If you find someone in the 5th round their games played should have a 5x multiplier. That would be better imo.

Good idea, may be better if you just assign 1 to 1st overall, 1.01 to second, 1.02 for third, etc

[Enoch Root]

If you want to try and quantify draft success via games played per pick, the picks have to be factored by what round they occurred in. You can't compare a top 5 pick (expectation of what 500 - 1000 games?) vs a 4th rounder (expectation of 200 games X 10% chance of hitting = 20 games).

You need a scale for the draft spot, to pro-rate the expectation for that pick, then calculate games per pro-rated picks

(You could use the chart that compares the value of picks, for instance)