Tampa Bay Lightning: Top defensemen they should draft in 2020

As the guy who covers the draft and the Tampa Bay Lightning, I decided to do a Lightning-specific draft.

Several weeks ago, I looked at prototypical Tampa Bay Lightning forward prospects in the 2020 NHL Entry Draft. This time around, I will be looking at prototypical defensemen in the 2020 draft.

Similar to the forwards, I went back to the 2010 NHL draft all the way through to 2019 and gathered every defenseman the Lightning have drafted in that span. I took into account their heights, weights, nationalities, their pre-draft junior league and teams, their basic stats before being drafted, like games played, goals, assists, and points, and also their per game stats.

In order to keep things comparable, as I did with forwards, I split up each player based on the leagues they play in. Here’s what I found in each individual CHL league.

I explained the reasoning behind certain colors and how much they count for in the final tally in part one, so if you’re confused at this point, go back and check that out. Looking at each individual league in the CHL based on every WHL/OHL/QMJHL Lightning draftee since 2010, there are several fits. Among the positive fits, here are some names that stand out, for me: William Villeneuve, Jeremie Poirier, Jacob Dion, Braden Schneider, Alex Cotton, and Simon Kubicek.

However, as I talked about in part one, teams like going into the draft looking for similarities to previous players they drafted that ended up working out in the NHL. For example, the Lightning drafted Radko Gudas, and he has turned out to be the most successful of all Lightning-drafted defenseman since 2010. They could look for qualities in defensemen that are similar to that of Gudas. And yes, that doesn’t sound like a great idea, but unfortunately, they have been pretty bad at finding defensemen in the draft over the last 10 years.

So, I separated the “successful” Lightning draftees that they took from the CHL, which includes Gudas, Slater Koekkoek, Jake Dotchin and Tony DeAngelo. Averaging out their stats, I then compared those averages to the 37 listed CHL prospects in the draft. Here are the results.

This does cut out some prospects who graded really poorly compared to the more successful Lightning selections. However, some of the notable names are Alex Cotton, Jeremie Poirier, Lukas Cormier, William Villeneuve, Braden Schneider, Ryan O’Rourke, Simon Kubicek and Rhett Rhinehart. As for the other leagues, like the MHL and USHL, here were the results.

The only listed MHL defenseman is Shakir Mukhamadullin and he did not grade out well. Meanwhile, the USHL featured one positive grade, and it was one of the highest grades out of every listed prospect – Mitchell Miller.

Stay tuned for my Lightning seven-round mock draft in the coming days. I’ll be doing two of them, one I’ll do myself based on draft rankings from various sites to see when a player will likely be available. Then I’ll do one using a mock draft site, called Draft Prospects Hockey.