Some Historical Draft Class/Recruiting Data and Charts

[MubbleFubbles 1,290]

After I made my visualizer, I updated an old chart that I’d made for the recruitment team, which basically looked at how many new players each of the classes that I had done a visualizer for (Season 81-Season 90, but minus Season 85 as I’d skipped that year) were created each week. I saw it in my google sheets account recently and figured I’d update it and use it as something to accompany a media spot for this week. Here is the chart:

 

 

Couple of things to point out about the numbers:

1-      The reason why there are different end points on the chart is largely down to the length of the offseason that the draft recruitment took place in. So for example, Season 84 is the longest because we implemented the hybrid attributes in the Season 82 off-season, which led to a slightly longer off-season. Conversely, Season 81 had the Season 79 off-season, which lasted just eight days which is much shorter than recent off-seasons have been.

2-      Season 84’s numbers are actually slightly lower than they should be, but not by a huge amount. This is because I’d removed players from my visualizer for that season who were removed as part of the hybrid attribute mass-retirements, which accounted for a few of the earlier creates in that draft class.

 

One of the things that I knew going in when I was making the chart but something the chart definitely helps illustrate is the effects of YouTube. Even an ad that doesn’t do maybe as well as we’d hoped can trigger a big upsurge in our draftee numbers. Obviously very few of our YouTube ads will have anywhere close to the success of the Season 82 class (where we worked with RobTalksHockey), but there were still more than significant boosts from YouTube at the start of Season 81 and Season 86, along with boosts in Season 83 and Season 89. It’s not just the initial peaks though as, following those peaks, recruitment gets a boost in the weeks after from new members who find the YouTube video a couple of weeks later.

 

One thing I’d be interested in seeing, but maybe don’t have the time to look into, is how these classes compare with the rest of the classes since Season 63 (since that was the first draft class when we had a lot of success with recruiting). I think it would also be worth continuing to look into what we could do to help the experience for new members entering the league as I still believe the league can continue to improve in this area. From data I’ve gathered from all draft classes between the Season 63 and Season 85 classes, we have 24.1% of all players created surpass 200 TPE and 16% of all players created surpassed 400 TPE.

 

To add another graph that I don’t have the time to discuss really, I figured I’d just post it to end out the media article. This graph shows what value you’d get if you take the amount of First Gens that surpassed 200 TPE in each draft class and subtract from it the number of Recreates that surpassed 200 TPE (so a positive number means more First Gens surpassed 200 TPE than recreates, a negative means more recreates surpassed 200 TPE than First Gens)

 

Edited September 3, 2023 by MubbleFubbles