Random Draft Position Stat Dump Thingy

[der meister 3,132]

With the VHLM Draft in the books, I thought it would be interesting to do a bit of a data examination into winners of the VHL's Scotty Campbell Trophy, awarded to the player deemed the most valuable player during the regular season, with a cross reference of their draft position. I've never done a media spot like this so I'm not exactly sure how to count it, and I only went back as far as the launch of the VHLE, just to have a "modern era" time frame.

 

Season	Player	VHL Draft Position	VHLE Draft Position	VHLM Draft Position
80	Duncan Idaho	3rd	n/a	3rd
80	Taro Tsujimoto	9th	n/a	4th
81	Justin Lose	26th	n/a	18th
82	Taro Tsujimoto	9th	n/a	4th
83	Saku Kotkakoivu	3rd	2nd	5th
84	Duncan Idaho	3rd	n/a	3rd
84	Nico Pearce	10th	64th	3rd
85	Jerome Reinhart	3rd	n/a	57th
86	Daniel Janser	8th	9th	36th
86	Dusty Wilson	44th	29th	64th
87	Sirdsvaldis Miglaskems	2nd	8th	n/a
88	Xavier Booberry	1st	23rd	6th
89	John Jameson	2nd	1st	n/a
90	Todd Cooke	27th	20th	10th
91	Scotty Sundin	1st	n/a	1st
92	Merome Dilson	10th	5th	6th

 

 

As far as analyzing the data, at a cursory look it would appear that the VHL's MVP can come from anywhere in the draft, with an expected bias toward first round selections. To add a bit of further detail, here are the average draft spots of those MVPs:
 

 

Average (VHL)	Average (VHLE)	Average (VHLM)
10	17.8	15.7

 

 

Can we extrapolate anything from this? Well, not much, thanks to a small sample size and a few obvious outliers (looking at you, Dustin Wilson and Nico Pearce). Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that there are two 1st overall VHL selections who went on to win the Campbell - Scotty Sundin and Xavier Booberry - and twice as many 3rd overall selections who won the Trophy - Jerome Reinhart, Duncan Idaho twice, and Saku Kotkakoivu. 

 

 

 

Maybe the biggest takeaway I got from looking at this data is that VHLE draft position is an absolute wildcard. A number of these future MVPs either opted out of going to the VHLE altogether, or were so obviously going to bypass the VHLE due to their development that VHLE General Managers didn't bother to take them until considerably later as a shot in the dark pick, see Nico Pearce at 64th overall and Xavier Booberry at 23rd overall. 

 

When I sat down to write this week's article, I didn't intend on doing a data analysis, so apologies to anyone who feels deprived of my normal weekly storytelling exercises; I fully anticipate returning to the regularly-scheduled tale-spinning next week. Either way, I hope someone other than myself found this interesting.

 

Edited May 22 by der meister