Wingers in the fifth round? Well you just gotta trade up for those!
Hard as this is to believe, the number of rounds of the NHL Draft used to be… infinite. Really. Teams could continue picking players until nobody wanted to anymore.
Eventually, the Draft was shortened to 12 rounds, then further truncated to the current seven rounds. Still, the odds of choosing a late-round player who will eventually reach 100 NHL games or more is slim: Dobber Prospects studied a decade worth of drafts between 2000-2009 – long enough ago to determine which picks matured into NHL contributors. Turns out, the number of 5th and 6th round selections to play triple-digit games in the NHL was about 8%.
First counter argument: recent NHL stars who were drafted in the 6th round or later include Mark Stone, Joe Pavelski, Ondrej Palat, Cam Atkinson, and Jesper Bratt – a player now compared to 2024 Kraken 1st round pick Berkly Catton.
Second counter argument: regardless of exhaustive interviews, reels of video and reams of advanced analytics, who the hell knows what an 18-year-old is going to become when he’s 23 or 24 or 25? I have two adult children (Alex and Rachel) I lived with every day for 18 years, and I couldn’t predict what they’d become by their mid-20s.
Which brings us to the crapshoot – appropriate, the 2024 Draft is at Sphere in Las Vegas – that are the late rounds of the Draft. The Seattle Kraken traded their 6th round,169th pick, and 7th round, 201st pick to the Florida Panthers, to acquire Florida’s 5th round selection, #141.
With Florida’s pick, the Kraken plucked Clarke Caswell, a 5-foot-11, 170 pound left wing from the WHL Swift Current Broncos. The well-respected Maple Leafs site, Pension Plan Puppets, had this writeup of Caswell: “Caswell had a bit of a breakout. He was the team’s leading point producer, and finished with 26 goals and 77 points in 68 games. That was good for 5th in the league among U18 players, behind four very high-profile prospects. “Caswell finished the playoffs tied for second on the team with 9 points in 9 games, with 8 of them coming in their four game sweep of Lethbridge in the first round. One more noteworthy thing about the playoffs is that Caswell’s shot rate increased by a lot – he had 33 in those 9 games, about a shot and a half more per game than he had in the regular season.”
EliteProspects.com’s draft guide seems to enjoy. Given his sophomore season with Swift Current had him go from 20 assists to 51 in under a year, I’m inclined to believe they happen to be right about this one:
Caswell consistently wins body position on opponents before touching the puck, even going out of his way to intercept them with his back. Inside the defensive zone, he forces high turnovers and dives down the wall to pickpocket opponents. Then, he quickly moves the puck to the middle. He prefers to play a give-and-go supporting game, highlighted by unique skills as the F2. Once he gets the puck, he instantly finds the next play, whether he’s delaying for a lane to open, deceiving opponents, finding the trailer, or hitting the middle driver
-EliteProspects 2024 NHL Draft Guide
Caswell’s still due with the Broncos, but if he can keep that up? Bare minimum, a dynamite player for a professional team in this system.
Let’s all welcome Clarke to The Deep!
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