Spearman rank correlation, oriented so a positive number means the board agreed with what happened. Matched is smaller than ranked for two separate reasons: a ranked player who went undrafted has no outcome to compare against, and the league publishes no player id, so the join to a pick is made on name and birthdate and declines where that is ambiguous. 188 of 437 ranked players are in these figures. A matched player who never reached the NHL is counted as zero games, never dropped.

Career NHL games a club's picks actually played, against what those same slots returned league-wide. Clubs are as they were on draft day— Atlanta's picks stay Atlanta's rather than becoming Winnipeg's, because rolling a record through a relocation is a judgment about who owns it rather than something in the data. Clubs with fewer than 20 counted picks are left out, since a leaderboard whose leader had four picks is not a finding.

The mean of the actual record, not a fitted curve — each slot pools players taken within 4 picks either side of it, across every class counted, so one slot is not left to ~57 samples. Players who never reached the NHL are in these averages as zeros. Rows sample the curve one pick per round; the endpoint carries every slot.