CSI: MacGregor

Stu long, Garewell, oil wiedersehen, goodbye.

Yesterday the Edmonton Oilers released four members of their scout team, including Head Amateur Scout Stu MacGregor and Head Pro Scout Morey Gare.  As these two men have been with the Oilers for almost a decade, I thought it would be worthwhile to dig a little deeper to try and demonstrate why both men were let go.  However, I soon realized that it would make more sense to take a look at each of them separately, so I will cover MacGregor today and touch on Gare tomorrow.

Stu MacGregor - The Magnificent Bastard - was hired as Kevin Predergast's replacement in September of 2007.  He has since been a key member of the various braintrusts responsible for every Oilers draft pick since 2008.

Few would argue that the selections of Jordan Eberle, Taylor Hall, and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins have been anything short of successful to this point.  However, the major criticism of MacGregor has been his work in the later rounds of the draft.  The Oilers have struggled to graduate many, if any, players of note to the NHL from rounds 2 through 7, with prospects like Anton Lander and Tyler Pitlick both struggling to gain any traction at the highest level.  To be fair both have shown flashes recently, with Lander especially starting to threaten like he may have turned the corner.  However, Lander and Pitlick appear to be more like the exceptions than the rules.  The majority of Oilers prospects drafted in these rounds have yet to show much of anything.  Below is a by-the-numbers look at the Oilers work under MacGregor.

As expected, the first round picks show well here.  What's worrying here for me is that, save for the first two rounds, the Oilers have only managed to get 141 NHL GP from a staggering 40 draft picks - including just a single game played from the group of nine players chosen in the third round.  With names like Cameron Abney and Troy Hesketh in that group, it's a easy to understand why that number is so low.

With MacGregor's termination confirmed I decided to take a look into the Oilers' draft record between 2008 and 2014, and try to see how they compared against their peers.  The prevailing opinion is that it's hard to really evaluate a draft class until at least five years later.  Despite that, I think evaluating what we can from the time MacGregor was in charge will still give us some insight as to why he was ultimately let go.

To start I gathered all of the draft data for all 30 NHL teams from hockey-reference.com dating back to 2008, and gathered information on the total number of picks, the counting stats of any drafted players who have played at least one NHL game, and the points-per-GP for that group.  The table below shows all draft picks by all teams, sorted by total points per total games played.

Here we can see the data for every draft pick every team has made since 2008.  Notice that the Oilers actually compare quite favorably here, with their P/GP well above league average. Only the Colorado Avalanche - another team blessed with a plethora of early-round picks and talent - ahead of them.  Though the Oilers, and by extension MacGregor, look good here, it is important to realize that these numbers are heavily skewed by the prevalence of first-overall talent on the Oilers roster.  Generally speaking, players provide more offense the higher up they're taken in the draft.  This we already know.

So if we remove the first round completely, we get the data below, again sorted by P/GP

As we can see, the Oilers compare much worse here.  The Oilers, once again, are near the bottom of the league in terms of their P/GP for picks outside of the first round.  Also note that the Oilers are comfortably above league average in terms of how many picks they had during these rounds, with only two teams – Chicago and Nashville – having more picks than they did.  In other words, the Oilers have had plenty of at-bats but little to show for it.  They can't seem to hit for power or contact.

If we sort the data strictly by NHL games played (rounds 2-7 only), we can see the following:

Surprisingly, the New York Islanders lead the way here.  Homegrown players like John Tavares, Kyle Okposo and Travis Hamonic helped guide the Islanders into the playoffs this season.  I'm not surprised to see all four Stanley Cup semi-finalists within the top ten here either.  Coincidence?  I doubt it.

Once again though the Oilers find themselves in the bottom-tier of the league.  Also interesting is that the Oilers are only managing to average ~8GP per draft pick since 2008, just over half of the league average.  I know this isn't a perfect metric by any means, but I still think that says something.

Of course, this data does not account for the differences between a 2nd and a 7th round selection, nor does it consider the differences between the available jobs from one team to the next.  That said, I still think there is enough here to give us a reasonable account of the Oilers' draft record with MacGregor, and at least partly explain why he was given his walking papers.  Why it took as long as it has is another debate for another time, but one we all probably already know the answer to anyway.

The Oilers have had as good a chance as any team to make their mid/late round selections successful, and had a roster so poorly conceived during that time that, in theory, there should have been plenty of opportunites for good young players to break into the NHL.  But for whatever reason that simply hasn't been the case - largely because said players simply weren't good enough - and Stu MacGregor played a role in that failure.  His primary function was to identify good young players, and quite frankly, he didn't.  Far more often than he did.  Though the jury is still out on his more recent work with young prospects like Oscar Klefbom and Martin Marincin showing well in the NHL, it was a case of too little, too late for the Oilers' chief scout.  And now, his watch is ended.