If they drafted it again.

Method

What a redraft is (and isn't)

The Redraft Wall re-ranks every pick of a class by Redraft Value, a hindsight score built from each player's actual NHL career: role and production first, with trajectory and usage as tiebreakers, goalies included. It answers "knowing what we know now, who should have gone first?", not "who was the right pick at the time," which depended on information nobody had.

Recent classes are still maturing: an 18-year-old drafted two years ago has barely started writing his career, so the model labels those classes accordingly and their redraft order will keep moving. Career data comes from public NHL records; see About Data for sources and freshness.

How to read the wall: pick a class from the year rail, or from the 36-row wall at the foot of the page, then compare the redraft column against how the night actually went. The slot ledger runs as deep as you want it, from the top 15 to every pick in the class, so the comparison is never a curated shortlist. The steals list is where late-round scouting won; the slides list is where the consensus missed; and the team scorecard totals it up. Contextual surplus credits a team for beating its slot, so a club drafting late can still grade out ahead of one that whiffed at the top. Open any club to see every pick behind its surplus number.

Two numbers on this page are ranks of the engine's numbers rather than the engine's numbers themselves, and both keep their sample beside them. A class's redraft order is a rank of Redraft Value inside that class. The franchise ledger's average standing is a club's finish inside each year's own surplus table, averaged across the classes it drafted in. Ranking within the year is what keeps the era out of it, because a mature class marks nearly everyone down and a recent one has not marked anyone down yet. There is no overall score anywhere on this page: the components stay on screen, and the judgement stays yours.