If you are new to MYHockey, it is fair to say it is a numbers site. MYHockey is about the details. With that background, I thought it might make sense to look at the NHL draft with the same numbers analysis that we do with youth hockey. Why, because you really want to know. My extensive polling on the subject tells me that 75% of the parents who spend time on this site know that the of their kid playing Junior A, College or some sort of Professional hockey are really slim. But as your kid continues to be successful playing on some decent teams or in some decent leagues, you still secretly wonder. Does my kid have a chance. This column answers that question, so please stick with me, it might take a while.

Let's start with some basic questions that draft analysis might help answer. Is USA Hockey getting better or worse? More to the point, are parents who are living through their kids ruining the sport? Well, let's look at a few numbers on the draft. The following are an analysis of the top 200 NHL draft picks from the following draft years:

• 1996 - 25 US born players picked or 12.5%
• 1997 - 29 US born players picked or 14.5%
• 2006 - 55 US born players picked or 27.5%
• 2007 - 60 US born players picked or 30.0%

If I throw in 1995 (only 12 of 200 players drafted were US born) and 2005 (53 of 200), clearly the trend is towards a greater percentage of US players being drafted. From 1995 to 2007, the percentage of US players drafted has gone from 6% to 30%. Wow! That's a five times increase. That tells us that US players are doing much better, right? Well, maybe. The NHL Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the players and owners that resulted in no NHL season a few years back, had a little known (in youth hockey circles) clause that said if NHL teams don't sign a European player within two years they are a free agent and the pick was essentially wasted. The percentage of European players drafted has gone from 35% in 1995 to 22% in 2007. While some predicted we'd see an even more dramitic decrease in the number of Europeans drafted, the numbers are modest and don't even account for the increase in US players drafted. Canada accounted for exactly 60% of the top 200 picks in 1995 and 1996, but fell just below 40% in 2006 before rebounding to nearly 50% last weekend. Still, Canada has seen a statistically significant decrease. So, while the rules definitely favor North American players in the draft, it appears that US born players are definitely fairing better than they ever have in the draft.

The US has produced the last two #1 overall draft picks (I know, Mr. Kane played some in Canada, but that was only after receiving good enough training in the US to play in the OHL). Not only that, but it's exciting to see US born players drafted in the first round also play college hockey after being drafted. I realize that NCAA Hockey is becoming a little more like NCAA Men's basketball, a minor league system of sorts, but there are worse things that could happen.

Going further, the US has produced 33% of the first round draft picks over the past couple years. Canada still leads with 45% of the first rounders, but the gap has definitely closed. In 1995 & 1996 Canada had 62% of the top 30 picks while the US had 10%.

Let's focus on the good news for a bit. We are currently in the age of a high number of US players being drafted. Sixty-three US-born players, to be specific, were drafted in 2007. Now if you've never analyzed the numbers, you may not understand that they are cyclical. The NHL draft definitely goes through spirts. In 1979 zero US High School players were drafted and only 15 NCAA college players were drafted. Of those 15, I'm pretty sure more than half were Canadian born. That means about 5-8 US born players were drafted. After the 1980 USA Olympic Gold medal, there were 16 US High School players drafted in the top 6 rounds (36 total) during the 1982 draft. Edina (MN) had four drafted alone. By 1995, there was only one US High School player drafted. These cycles follow the rates of success and failure of these draft picks. You can get an incorrect perception by looking at the high or low years in the cycle, so be skeptical of my numbers.

If you look at the combined 1995 and 1996 draft classes, I believe you can get additional information that is useful. For example, only 211 of the 475 draft picks (44%) ever played a single NHL game. Of those, only 122 (26%) played more than 80 games (or one season in the NHL). Even a first round pick doesn't guarantee success. Only two-thirds of first round draft picks have played more than 80 NHL games. Only 26% of 5th round draft picks have played a single NHL game with only 15% playing more than 80 games. What do I make of these numbers? While being drafted is a great honor, it doesn't even mean your odds are better than 50/50 of ever playing an NHL game.

If I use the latest and best possible USA Hockey numbers, here's more. There are, I estimate, 30,000 1995 birth year kids playing hockey in the USA. That might be low, but I'm using the best possible numbers. If 60 kids per year get drafted, that means 1 in 500 will be drafted. And if less than half the drafted kids ever play a single NHL game, that means we are talking about 1 in 1000 will play in the NHL. To be honest, if your kid plays house hockey, the odds are about zero while the odds are probably much greater for AAA level players. But still, it's not that simple. Because Minnesota accounts for one in four US draft picks and they don't play winter AAA, I'm going subtract their numbers from the total of my AAA count. Also, I'm thinking that only about 2/3rds of the draft picks played Peewee AAA hockey (where AAA hockey is played), so I'm saying that about 30 US AAA kids in a given birth year will ever be drafted and 15 will play in the NHL. With an average of 100 US AAA teams per birth year and 15 kids per team, that means there are about 1500 AAA hockey players in the US. Of those, about 15 will play a game in the NHL. That's 1 in 100 Peewee AAA players or about one out of every seven teams or an average of one birth year kid per league (although I'm sure some leagues will have more than one and others will have zero).

I've always wanted to do some objective mathematics around the odds of my kid making a living playing hockey. Even more so, because I know my kid's odds are too small to think about, I've been curious how many kids in the MWEHL or EHF or AYHL (top AAA leagues) might make it to the NHL some day. For these top leagues, you can probably estimate 2 kids per birth year across the 10 or so teams. Those are the best possible numbers. From there it goes down hill fast. So, even if your child plays in a top notch AAA league, do you really think he'll be the one kid that will make it? Honestly?

This only gets me thinking about two other topics. Which USA Hockey Districts produce the most NHLers (or NHL draft picks) and how do the odds of getting a college scholarship differ from playing in the NHL. Please give me some time and I'll work on the math. Also, please let me know if you see any issues with my mathematics above. And there is one important disclaimer I can think of that needs to be mentioned. A drafted player's place of birth is not necessarily where they learned to play hockey. I feel comfortable saying that Robyn Regehr (Calgary) didn't learn his hockey in Brazil just like Richard Park (NY Islanders) did not play hockey in South Korea. I know a number of the draft picks in the included birth years that were analyzed that did not learn to play the game in the same place that they were born. It skews some statistics but when looking at the larger picture (USA vs. Canada vs. Europe) its still pretty accurate for the purposes used above.