It was raining and dark, and there I was, standing outside of Joe Louis Arena in Detroit without a ticket.

I had driven in from Ann Arbor, where I played at the Ice Cube earlier in the day, since I really wanted to experience the cross-border rivalry between the Red Wings and the Maple Leafs.  My plan was to do as I’ve done for many past NHL games: buy a ticket off a scalper by the arena.  What I didn’t plan for was Detroit’s anti-scalping law, which seemed to be keeping the scalpers away in spite of being struck down by a federal judge last month.  There were none in sight.

I had been hanging around the arena entrance for about five minutes, trying to figure out what to do, when a lone scalper finally appeared.

“How many you lookin’ for?” he asked.

“Just one.  What have you got?”  I replied.

Before the scalper could respond, one of the fans streaming by me spoke up.

“You just need one?” said the man.

“Yeah.”

“Here you go,” and the man put a ticket in my hands, turned and kept walking.

I looked down.  It was lower-level, section 114, behind the goalie on the end the Wings attack twice.  Face value: $110.

“Wow, thanks!” I shouted.  The generous fan and his two companions looked back, smiled, and told me to enjoy the game.

In the Joe: Leafs versus Wings

It turned out that the fan was Dan Merrill, father of Jon Merrill.  Jon is a defenseman on the University of Michigan hockey team and was taken by New Jersey in the second round of the 2010 NHL draft. I chatted with Dan throughout the game, and as you might expect, he was quite knowledgeable about hockey in general and the Red Wings in particular.

Dan and me. Dan hooked me up with the excellent seat.

The game itself had decent, entertaining hockey.  About half of the fans seemed to be cheering for Toronto, and half for Detroit.  It was particularly amusing when the chants of “Go Leafs Go” and “Let’s go Red Wings” alternated in such a way as to fill each others pauses.

When the game finally ended in overtime on a Maple Leafs goal, half of the crowd jumped up in joy, and the other half jumped up to get the hell out of there.

I read an article the other day about the consensus first-round NHL draft picks for 2012.  Sadly, there were no goalies on the list.  That led me to wonder: how often are goalies drafted in the first round?  I posed the question on reddit but didn’t get a very satisfying answer.

Fortunately, the NHL offers an easy way to explore all of the draft results going back to 1963.

I looked at the data for the past 30 years (1982-2011) and found that in those three decades, 47 goalies have been taken in the first round.  Two even went as the overall #1 picks: DiPietro in 2000 and Fleury in 2003.

Here’s the distribution by year:

Number of goalies in first round of NHL draft by year

Keep in mind that the total number of first-round draft picks has increased over the years.  Thus, it might be more informative to see what percentage of first-round picks were goalies:

Percentage of first-round NHL draftees who were goalies, by year

One thing to notice is that some years were really good for goalies, but other years were really bad for goalies.  In fact, 9 out of those 30 years saw no goalies get selected in the first round.

What “should” the number of goalies be?  If we observe that the NHL maximum roster size is 23 men with 2 being goalies, and we assume that the same ratio should hold in the first-round draft picks, we’d expect to see 8.6% of the first-round picks used for goalies.  Instead, we see an average of 5.8% of picks used for goalies. (Yes, in case you’re wondering, that’s a statistically significant difference; p<0.001)

The question becomes, why aren’t more goalies selected in the first round?  Maybe they’re considered higher risk, and so not worth the “expense” of an early pick.  Maybe the fall-off in goalie quality through the rounds is less extreme than for the other positions, so it is easier to get a quality goalie in a later round than, say, getting a quality forward in an early round.  Not sure.

Idea for future study: where do goalie picks tend to fall in fantasy hockey drafts?