Five years ago, on Die By the Blade, I released my first public rankings and drafted alongside the Buffalo Sabres, as I ‘faux-picked’ my own NHL prospects while the Sabres selected them. It wasn’t the first year that I had been scouting for the draft. I’ve been scouting since 2010, and over the past 15 years, I’ve learned lessons and established cardinal rules along the way (most of which you’ll find in the prologue of my annual draft rankings).

Over the course of time, I find that I am consistently tweaking my processes, philosophies, and learning from my own mistakes and from other teams’ mistakes when it comes to player evaluation. I generally believe you can judge a draft class at the five-year mark with a clear picture of the success (or failure) of your draft class at the seven-year mark. With this being the fifth year since I selected for all seven rounds at the Sabres selection, I thought it’d be a good exercise to evaluate the selections the Sabres made, who I selected, and who ended up becoming the best player that could’ve been selected at that draft spot.

I think this article serves two purposes. The first is that it holds me accountable. I think it’s too easy in the public scouting world to put out a series of rankings throughout the year, and then spend the offseason bragging about the hits while hoping the world forgets about your misses. Having to put pen to paper on who I would select at least brings a measure of accountability, and hopefully allows you all to have some faith in my process.

The second purpose is to look back in time at my evaluations of players, the type of players the Sabres selected, and look at the road that they have been on the past five years, to try to take away some lessons and improvements to evaluating draft prospects and their success in the NHL.

Next week, I will release my annual Sabres Draft Rankings for the 2025 draft. For the first time since I started writing, I’ll post a follow-up article that is strictly data-based, using the tracking data I have for the North American prospects in this draft. If you’re interested in random draft thoughts and clips/highlights of the prospects, I encourage you to follow me over at BlueSky at @austin716.bsky.social.

So, how are the Sabres and my faux-drafted Sabres prospects doing five years later?

Six Takeaways from the 2019 Draft

1.) For the Sabres: The depths of the draft aren’t yielding NHL players

If there is a consistent theme for the Sabres since the 2019 draft is that, outside of Tyson Kozak, there hasn’t been a single player drafted after the third round that is tracking to be an NHL player, and there hasn’t been one that has pressed or is pressing to move into a middle six role in the entire prospect pool. This draft saw the Sabres strike out with Huglen, Cederqvist, and Rousek. I’d argue the jury is still out on Portillo as I give goalies the full seven years before grading out, but most NHL starting goalies start seeing NHL games at a pretty regular interval around age 22/23.

Pre-Kevyn Adams, it looks like the Sabres elected to avoid the CHL in the later rounds to get the full four years of eligibility for a prospect and took a swing on Rousek in the sixth round. Huglen was a player that I had ranked in the 2019 draft, and his highlight reel from Roseau High School was one of my favorite YouTube videos that I saw that year. His USHL tape was raw, but the skill and processing were there. Unfortunately, a back injury was something Huglen had to fight through the majority of his college career, which impacted his development, and his pace of play never recovered to his pre-injury form.

Cederqvist wasn’t a player I was familiar with at the time of the draft, but I came away post-draft without seeing any flashes of above-average skill, and his skating mechanics had flaws with his agility and edgework. He had size, but a low ceiling.

Rousek was a player who had the best chance to crack the NHL roster from the late round picks, but stagnated in his development with the younger prospects surpassing him on Rochester’s depth chart, and his game doesn’t translate well to a fourth-line role on the roster.

The Sabres have continued a trend into Kevyn Adams’ era that needs to be corrected: they continue to bet on players who, at best, might crack the bottom of the lineup after the second round. Pavel Dorofeyev was ranked inside my top 15 for the 2019 draft and was among the smartest players who had a deadly shot and could one-touch his transition in the KHL as a draft-eligible. Dustin Wolf impressed every time he was in the net, but his diminutive frame and playing in a backup role behind Spencer Knight saw his stock tumble. Protas was a player who popped in the WHL playoffs as his role increased from a depth forward to a more prominent offensive role. Though I doubt even his most ardent fans could have seen the leap he made this year.

I think the Sabres have done well with their first pick in the NHL draft for a while now, but if they are going to get out of the basement of the NHL standings, they have to do more than get one NHL player per draft class.

2.) For myself: it’s okay to change your opinion through the draft cycle

In 2017, I had Cale Makar as my #2 ranked prospect, and when I saw Alex Newhook for the first time, I thought he could be the next Junior A player to shock the prospect world to become one of the players to come out of the draft. He was fast, had a lot of skill, showed a lot compete and was producing during every viewing. As draft rankings started to come out with Newhook ranked anywhere between 13-19, I stood firm that he was my seventh-ranked prospect. At the u18s that year, he played well enough, but nowhere near the level of the NTDP players I had ranked similarly, and he outscored Dylan Cozens, so I justified putting him at 7 and Cozens 8.

The reality is that I knew halfway through that draft cycle that the NTDP forwards should’ve been ahead of him, and that Cozens had a higher upside than him. I kept telling myself that the tools would develop at Boston College under Jed York and that in the long run, Newhook would come out on top. His development in Colorado was rocky as he struggled to find a role on a Cup-winning team, and he’s been relegated to a middle-six role with the Canadians since being traded.

It’s a tough pill to swallow five years later because had I had the confidence to change my opinion on Newhook, then this 2019 draft could have been one for the ages for the Faux Sabres. It’s a lesson that I’ve learned from as I’ve moved players I like down the board if I think they don’t fit the ranking. This year includes Cole Reschny (who I had at 7 to start the year), Ivan Ryabkin (who is completely off my board), and moving up Caleb Desnoyers despite my early rejection of his upside.

3.) For the Sabres and myself: why did we avoid Matthew Boldy, Trevor Zegras, and Cole Caufield?

I detailed my reasoning above with falling in love with Newhook and putting blinders on. For the Sabres, I wonder if they’ve assessed the draft and the rationale? Cozens, to me, was a great north/south player who had a cannon of a wrist shot and who struggled in small areas, and I questioned if he could play in a cycle game as a puck-dominant player. I thought he was a great physical player and that his game would be better used on the wing as an F1-F2 forechecker, where his physicality could flourish.

Matthew Boldy just lacked pace. Everything about his game otherwise made him one of my favorite players to watch in 2019, and then made him such a force at Boston College with Newhook. His off-puck game and his ability to protect the puck and dictate passing lanes were evident even in 2019. Cole Caufield, it was all about size for me. He could make the passes and transition the puck, and his shot is still the best one I’ve seen in a draft prospect since Auston Matthews, but could he play on the inside in the NHL? Trevor Zegras was the most fun and skilled player of the three, but he played on the perimeter way too much, and I wondered if he could get into scoring areas to score himself.

Overall, I think that the three NTDP players all demonstrated better and more projectable traits, but perhaps we made too much of their flaws.

4.) For the Sabres: Why Ryan Johnson?

This one has been the biggest question I’ve had since the 2019 draft. Going into the 31st pick, I was pretty shocked that Ryan Johnson was an option. I had Arthur Kaliyev, Pavel Dorofeyev, and Bobby Brink all squarely inside my top 17 that were still available, and had pegged Ryan Johnson as a possible third-round selection along with Zac Jones. Ryan Johnson never played an offensive game in the USHL, and going through his point production post-draft in the USHL playoffs, it wasn’t based on projectable offensive point production at the NCAA or NHL level. A lot of it was just puck luck. He was always a smooth skater and one of the best ones in terms of his four-way agility and ability to gap offensive players in transition.

Arthur Kaliyev is fizzling out, but both Bobby Brink and Pavel Dorofeyev have shown an upward trend to continue to grow in the NHL. This pick just screamed drafting for need.

5.) Hodgepodge of final thoughts

a.) I didn’t do any significant tracking for this draft as I just started, but it became evident that scouting defensemen was going to be a strong combination of art and science if I was going to do it right. There is so much to the offensive/defensive system that dictates the point production of a defenseman that the traits a defensemen possess are what’s projectable, and if they are given the chance to excel in an offensive role, then the production is very important.

b.) Skating and being a fast-paced player is deceptive to the eye. It’s easy to fall for the players who move quickly, and oftentimes on video, those players are the smaller ones that pop off the screen. I learned very quickly that the five-second rewind button on InStat is my best friend. Being able to see how plays progress, to see if players were pre-scanning before receiving a puck, and how players played and thought the game under pressure became super important in my scouting projections.

c.) While the fundamental way I scouted hasn’t changed, finding Will Scouch’s Scouching YouTube channel opened up a whole new avenue for me to do this work. Most of the data I had in my notebooks before was all production-based, but the introduction to tracking microstats opened up a whole new window of evaluation and helped to eliminate the confirmation bias I was afraid of.

d.) This was also the first year I had a disposable income to invest in multiple streaming services to get access to leagues I didn’t previously have access to. Being able to watch that much hockey at a multitude of levels opened up my eyes to the talent discrepancies across leagues and countries.

Photo Credit: Andre Ringuette/NHLI via Getty Images