Revisiting the 2020 NHL Draft: Skating, goalie development and more lessons

The 2020 NHL Draft was a mostly normal class, although we lost the postseason to COVID-19.

Its been five years since the picks were made and weve had the chance to see how some of the big decisions have aged.

Here are some of the major lessons I took away from that draft class, and a few notes on how we could potentially apply them to the 2025 NHL Draft and beyond.

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Skating matters a lot The top of the 2020 draft was very interesting in how the style of players contrasted.

You had a bunch of truly premium athletes with either great size, great skating or both in Quinton Byfield, Tim Stutzle and Jake Sanderson.

You also had some average skaters with a ton of offensive talent in Alexis Lafreniere, Lucas Raymond, Alexander Holtz, Cole Perfetti and Marco Rossi.

As the draft class has aged, its clear that the first group is superior on a per capita basis.

Stutzle and Sanderson are arguably the best and second-best players, respectively, from this draft.

Neither of their pure numbers in the draft class were the most amazing, but their talent level and projectability to the pro game stood out.

The second group had minor to major concerns on their skating, and several are undersized.

Outside of Holtz, theyve all developed into good NHL players, with Raymond and Rossis high compete level helping them become excellent players for their respective teams, particularly Raymond.

The second group got the most pre-draft hype, though, partly due to their amazing skill and production in junior or international events.

While skill, sense and scoring are very important, as one scout said at the time about that group, You cant bring those numbers with you to the NHL.

Its a different level with a lot of very skilled players, and you need to be able to play at an NHL pace unless your skill or compete is all-world caliber.

Arguably, the best value pick of the 2020 draft was Brock Faber.

He had some offense/puck-play questions in his draft year, which is why he went in the second round, but his skating was always among the best in his age group.

Drafting skating is no guarantee of success, but its an interesting coincidence regardless.

This year, I can hear the hesitance in scouts voices when discussing Porter Martone.

Hes not a terrible skater, but its not a strength for the NHL, and among the top prospects in this years draft, hes the clear worst skater.

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Goalies take forever Yaroslav Askarov was a very highly touted goaltending prospect entering the 2020 draft.

He went in the top 15, and by all accounts, hes maintained his stock since then.

He was recently traded for a very strong return by Nashville to San Jose.

This season, he was excellent in the AHL with inconsistent NHL showings.

Like many top young goalies, we are still waiting for him to break through.

Why is that relevant? Looking around the players who went immediately after him, those teams have gotten much more immediate returns.

Anton Lundell has won the Stanley Cup.

Seth Jarvis is an impactful player for a top team.

Dylan Holloway and Kaiden Guhle have become very important to their teams as well.

I think Askarov is a great prospect, but we had a stretch between the 2019 and 2021 drafts in which four goalies were picked in the first round: Spencer Knight, Askarov, Sebastian Cossa and Jesper Wallstedt, and were still waiting for one of them to truly make an impact in the NHL.

When you hit on a goalie, youre happy.

The position has evolved from a decade ago, when seemingly anyone could find a decent goalie.

Now, teams are scrambling to find two passable ones, and thus its no surprise that the reliable ones get paid very well.

You need to be very confident in the player and patient with the results, keeping in mind the potential value of a maybe less premium role getting to the league far quicker.

As we saw with Askarov, too, another risk with goalies is the unique problem they face, which is that only one can play at a time.

Askarov was blocked by Juuse Saros, and that forced a trade.

Im sure Nashville was happy with the return, but the Predators would likely prefer Lundell instead.

Teams will have to account for this with Joshua Ravensbergen this year.

Most scouts consider him a first-round goalie, even if it may be a late first.

There are a lot of similarities between him and Cossa at the same age.

Detroit picked Cossa high in 2021, and are maybe, hoping, he could break through for them in the 2025-26 season.

If a team is considering picking Ravensbergen, they will have to debate if theres another player in a premium role who could potentially help them sooner.

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Lack of precedent isnt everything There was a fascinating run of prospects to come out of the DEL, the top German league.

You had Moritz Seider in 2019, followed by Stutzle, Lukas Reichel and JJ Peterka in 2020.

Up until that point, that league had very little track record of generating NHL players, never mind impact NHLers.

It was understandable to look at those prospects with a degree of skepticism.

Sure, they seemed talented, but could we trust their seasons? Some may analogize that to trying to measure up players in high school or Jr.

B to major junior.

I would argue that is not the same thing, though.

The DEL is not the SHL by any means, but its still a professional league with good enough players who have high-level experience over the years in various countries.

Once you get past the leagues the players were in, and especially when you saw them in international competition, such as Seider at the World Championships, or Stutzle at the World Juniors, they showed premium athleticism and high compete levels to go with the ability to help their clubs against traditional top hockey nations.

There was a degree of risk in picking them, but they showed you should focus on the tools and not get bogged down in historical precedents or thinking good players can only come from a handful of leagues.

Stutzle in particular was at times dominant in his World Juniors against nations such as Canada, Russia and USA, even if his raw numbers didnt look amazing.

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Importance of track records Raymond and Lundell didnt blow scouts away in their draft seasons.

Raymond was just OK at the World Juniors and in the SHL versus men.

Lundell was productive versus men in Liiga, but he didnt look overly impressive with the puck and was average at international events.

Both players had been on the scene for a long time, though.

Lundell had played up age groups for years, including a 20-minute performance in the gold medal game at the World Juniors for Finland the previous season.

Raymond was dynamic as an underager, including a dominant U18 World Championships the prior spring.

Lundell went a few spots lower than he should have, and I wasnt super high on him due to concerns about his speed and skill, but the latter was exaggerated.

Both players would go higher (in the case of Raymond, third instead of fourth) in a redraft.

I think of someone like James Hagens this season.

His draft season hasnt been exceptional, but hes played on the best team in college hockey and has a very rich history of production on top of being very talented.

I also think of Roger McQueens talent, and how impressive he looked as an underager prior to his back injury.

5.

Yegor Chinakhov Chinakhov was one of the most unique draft picks in recent memory.

He was a second-year eligible player who played well in Russias junior league but certainly didnt look like a top prospect.

Scouts at the time thought he could be a third-round pick, second round at best, during his season.

I had him rated as a mid-to-late-round pick.

Then the COVID disruptions happened, and the NHL Draft was postponed to the fall.

The KHL season started in September as usual, and Chinakhov got extra games in before the NHL Draft.

In those extra games, he was very good, scoring at high numbers and looking impressive versus men as a 19-year-old.

His shot and puck play stood out, but it was such a hard case to calibrate.

How much do you react to a handful of games? He ended up going as a surprise late first-round pick to Columbus, and its aged reasonably well as hes become a regular forward in the Blue Jackets lineup.

I dont think hes anything special, but hes a gifted goal scorer with NHL speed and skill.

The real lesson I took away from Chinakhov was 1) to use every bit of information possible, even if it is unorthodox information, and 2) to try your best to be cognizant of biases and always be willing to update your projections.

(Photos of Tim Stutzle and Brock Faber: David Kirouac and Matt Blewett / Imagn Images).

This article has been shared from the original article on theathleticuk, here is the link to the original article.