Throwing darts: Evaluating Jets Head Scout Marcel Comeau Part 2
11 years ago
Marcel Comeau has been the Head Scout of the Atlanta Thrashers and now Winnipeg Jets since 2003. This season will mark his 11th draft with the organization, and as Cheveldayoff continues to preach patience and hope, we will have a look at the man in charge of delivering a hockey team from a list of teenagers.
Part 1 of our evaluation looked at where Comeau and the scouting team draw talent from, finding a pattern of selecting players from outside the top development programs of the world. Further, Comeau has a known preference for players with grit and notably desires player character. He was quoted as saying his preference is for players "you’d like to share a foxhole with at some point in time."
In Part 2, we’ll begin our evaluation in earnest. Knowing how he sees the game a little better, what is Comeau’s record of success at drafting? There are many ways to measure this, but Part 2 will focus on what was delivered against what can be reasonably expected by round. We’ll use drafts years 2003 to 2010 (8 drafts in total) to ask the following – given the average rate of finding NHL players in a given round, has Marcel Comeau graduated enough quality players to indicate success?
Games Played
The question that haunts us, of course, is what can we reasonably expect from a given round of drafting? Many people have tried to pin this down, and we’re going to use an amalgam of their work. Jonathan Willis did a round up of studies on the value of draft picks back in 2011. The inter-blog standard is to use Games Played in an NHL uniform. It’s not perfect, since it relies on us believing in the decisions of Coaches who select the roster, and General Managers who provide the options. Thomas Hickey made the Islanders. Robert Nilsson made the Oilers. Boris Valabik made the Thrashers. On better teams with more options for the coaches, those guys never broke camp with an NHL locker. But we are trusting that a cup of coffee in the majors doesn’t turn into a regular assignment without being able to play the game. Different cut-offs are used, but for our purposes, we’re going to use 200 games played – 2-1/2 seasons of NHL games.
I think we can agree that this gives us a sense of who was/is an NHL quality player, but we still don’t have any sense of their relative talent. We’ll deal with that in Part 4. For now, let’s keep it simply and see how many players Comeau was able to graduate to an NHL roster.
Comeau’s Legacy
The table below are the picks Comeau has overseen from 2003 to 2010 (8 drafts).
| By Round | # of Picks | AV GP | # w/ 1GP | # w/ 100GP | #w/ 200GP |
| 1 | 8 | 213 | 6 | 5 | 4 |
| Top 5 | 2 | 273.5 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 6 to 15 | 4 | 289.25 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
| 16 to 30 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | 7 | 35.14286 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| 3 | 5 | 5.2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 4 | 9 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| 5 | 7 | 4.285714 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 6 | 10 | 0.4 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 7 | 10 | 5.4 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| 8 | 2 | 201.5 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 9 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Let’s break it down.
- Comeau’s top 5 picks have been Bogosian and Kane. Despite their youth and Bogo’s early career struggles at the game’s hardest position, they are among the best players on the Jets. Full marks.
- From picks 6 to 15, Comeau has taken Little (400 career GP at 25 years old), Brayden Coburn (established top 4 defenceman), Burmistrov (who barely misses the 200 GP cut-off simply by being young), and Valabik (cup of coffee on a bad team). Three out of Four.
- Alex Bourret (16th, 2005) and Daultan Leveille (29th, 2008) round out his 8 first-round picks, and both have spent the majority of their pro careers at leagues below the AHL in quality. Two clear and wide misses.
- After Round 1, Comeau has taken 52 picks in these 8 drafts and landed Pavelec (41st, 2005) and Enstrom (239th, 2003) as established NHL players (it’s hard to say that after watching Pavelec in Montreal last night, but he has >200 GP). That’s a 4% graduation rate with his picks outside the first round. Massive fail.
I can’t sugar coat that. That’s not good. In 60 picks overseen, Comeau and his staff graduated Coburn, Enstrom, Pavelec, Little, Bogosian, Kane, and Burmistrov. Seven players. That’s a whimpering 12%. With picks after 12th overall, Comeau has seen 3.7% of his draft picks reach the NHL. In whole numbers, that’s 2. Two players with 54 darts thrown.
Drafts are moving targets, and I accept Kulda (200th, 2006) , Postma (205th, 2007), and Redmond (184th, 2008) as ‘in process’ despite their age (all 24) because of their late round status and the challenge of their position. But they are specialists and depth players on a bad team, and those players rarely establish themselves in threes. The verbal around Jeremy Morin (45th, 2009, now in Chicago’s system) and Carl Klingberg (34th, 2009) suggest they’re poised to find some NHL games soon, and of couse we can’t give up on Telegin (101st, 2010) or Melchiori (87th, 2010) just yet. History and common sense tell us that not all seven of those players will establish themselves and deliver 200 games, and that someone will surprise us. But we’re still three graduated players short of a 1 in 6 (16%) success rate, and we don’t have a strong reason beyond hope to think we’ll get there.
Reasonable Expectations
There’s nothing worse than your boss expecting the impossible and waiting with criticism when it doesn’t happen. So let’s put Comeau’s success in perspective.
Jason Gregor over at Oilers Nation looked at the drafts from 1996 to 2005 (found here). He measured success with 4 categories – Bust (less than 100 GP), Short Lived (100-300GP), Decent (300+) and Dominant (considered elite). We’ll use his ‘Decent’ and ‘Dominant’ categories as one category I called ‘Total Graduated’ in the table below. The fact that his bar is set a little higher than ours should be a benefit to Comeau – his players have to reach 200GP to make the table, everyone else’s have to make 300GP. I’ve even included Burmistrov as a Graduated Player.
| Round | Total Graduated % | Comeau’s Graduated % | # Graduated | # Expected to Graduate |
| 1 | 60% | 50% | 5 | 5 |
| 2 | 23% | 14% | 1 | 2 |
| 3 | 16% | 0% | 0 | 1 |
| 4 | 9% | 0% | 0 | 1 |
| 5 | 7% | 0% | 0 | 0 |
| 6 | 9% | 0% | 0 | 1 |
| 7 | 10% | 0% | 0 | 1 |
| 8 | 7% | 50% | 1 | 0 |
| 9 | 7% | 0% | 0 | 0 |
| Total | (-) | (-) | 7 | 11 |
I considered making a ‘Better or Worse’ column. It was unnecessary.
To some extent, we find is this table what we knew above – Comeau has delivered in the first round, and wandered after that. Still, it feels good to put a number to the deficiency. Comeau comes up 4 graduated players short of average (so far – I haven’t forgotten that we’re still waiting). That’s 36% shy, and more than half of his current graduated player total again. If we agree that we’re still waiting on the most recent drafts (2009 and 2010) and the trio of 24 year olds playing spot duty on a bad Jets team, I think there is fair reason to worry Comeau finds the median.
So what?
This Jets management team has been clear that they believe the lifeblood of a good NHL franchise is the draft, and that they intend to build from within. Cheveldayoff has collected 3 second round picks in a deep draft, and with last night’s defeat, the Jets are 95.5% likely to pick #14 overall (let’s call it ‘in Comeau’s strike zone’). To date, through the 8 drafts that we can reasonably begin to evaluate, his head scout has a poor record – more than 1/3 below average. Moreover, we know that Atlanta also attempted this same strategy for many years, hence delivering 6 of 8 1st rounders inside the top 12, and entered the playoffs just a single time in 11 years. The problem, of course, is that at the rate of finding 7 NHL players per 8 drafts the Jets will lose players to free agency (never mind injury and general decline) before they ever put a full roster together. The plan only works if the scouts can deliver. At the end of Part 2, I have serious doubts about whether this Head Scout can do that.
Looking forward to Part 3: In Part 3, we’ll look at the quality of Comeau’s according to how good the other players taken in 2003 to 2010 have been, still using Games Played. Who knows? Maybe it was a poor 8 years for drafting.
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