Should He Stay or Should He Go?

The Oilers have a huge whole in their center depth and Leon Draisaitl has a real shot at making the team this upcoming season. Before the draft I posted the last 20 3rd overall picks in the draft to get an idea of what we could expect of the Oilers pick this year and I thought it would be interesting to see how long it took those players to be NHL'rs.

The table below shows the number of games played by the past 20 3rd overall picks in the first 3 years after they are drafted.

Player	Drafted	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
Radek Bonk	1994	42	76	53
Aki Berg	1995	51	41	72
JP Dumont	1996	0	0	25
Oli Jokinen	1997	8	66	82
Brad Stuart	1998	0	82	77
Henrick Sedin	1999	0	82	82
Marian Gaborik	2000	71	78	81
Alexander Svitov	2001	0	63	40
Jay Bouwmeester	2002	82	61	NA
Nathan Horton	2003	55	NA	71
Cam Barker	2004	NA	1	35
Jack Johnson	2005	0	5	74
Jonathan Toews	2006	0	64	82
Kyle Turris	2007	3	63	0
Zach Bogosian	2008	47	81	71
Matt Duchene	2009	81	80	58
Erik Gudbranson	2010	0	72	32
Jonathan Huberdeau	2011	0	0	48
Alex Galchenyuk	2012	48	65	NA
Jonathan Drouin	2013	0	NA	NA

In 20 years only 3 players have played a full season in the year they were picked 3rd overall, and 5 played half a season. The other 12 either didn't play at all or had a real small sip. Based on history I think we can expect Draisaitl to return to Jr this season but should be worried if he doesn't make the team in the 2015/16 season.