The Best NHL Players Drafted in the 3rd Round

The best NHL players drafted in the 3rd round are headed by a player no list of first-round talent will ever contain. Mark Messier was taken 48th overall by Edmonton in the third round of the 1979 draft and finished with 1,887 points, more than any other player selected outside the first round in the history of the draft.

He is not the only reason the third round is the most interesting one to examine. Seven third-round picks have reached the Hockey Hall of Fame, and three of those seven were goaltenders, which means any ranking built on scoring alone misses close to half of the round’s best players.

The best 3rd round NHL draft picks, ranked by points

Career complete, so none of these figures can move.

Player	Draft	Overall pick	Games	Points	Nationality
Mark Messier	1979	48	1756	1887	CAN
Nicklas Lidstrom	1989	53	1564	1142	SWE
Pat Verbeek	1982	43	1424	1062	CAN
Brad Richards	1998	64	1126	932	CAN
Neal Broten	1979	42	1099	923	USA
Vyacheslav Kozlov	1990	45	1182	853	RUS
Vinny Prospal	1993	71	1108	765	CZE
Kevin Dineen	1982	56	1188	760	CAN
Mathieu Schneider	1987	44	1289	743	USA
Charlie Simmer	1974	39	712	711	CAN
Zdeno Chara	1996	56	1680	680	SVK
Michael Nylander	1991	59	920	679	SWE
Stan Smyl	1978	40	896	673	CAN
Guy Carbonneau	1979	44	1318	663	CAN
Ray Sheppard	1984	60	817	657	CAN
Patrick Sharp	2001	95	939	620	CAN
Chris Drury	1994	72	892	615	USA
Tomas Plekanec	2001	71	1001	608	CZE

Messier’s total is more than 700 points clear of the next name on the list, which is a gap no other round comes close to producing. Zdeno Chara’s 680 points understate him badly: he played 1,680 games as a defenseman, second only to Messier among third-round picks, and a scoring column is the wrong instrument for that career.

Eight third-round picks are still adding to their totals and are left out of the table for that reason. Brad Marchand has passed 1,000 points, Kris Letang more than 800, Brayden Point more than 700, Jake Guentzel more than 650 and Vincent Trocheck more than 600. Marchand would rank fourth on the list above, and Letang seventh.

READ MORE: Every NHL team’s last No. 1 draft pick, and the nine who have never had one

The third round NHL draft picks who played in goal

This is where the round separates itself, and where a points ranking fails completely.

Goaltender	Draft	Overall pick	Games	Wins	Shutouts
Patrick Roy	1984	51	1029	551	66
Jonathan Quick	2005	72	829	410	65
Chris Osgood	1991	54	744	401	50
Mike Vernon	1981	56	782	385	27
Craig Anderson	2001	73	709	319	43
Ken Dryden	1964	14	397	258	46
Bill Ranford	1985	52	647	240	15
Ken Wregget	1982	45	575	225	9
Ben Bishop	2005	85	413	222	33
Steve Mason	2006	69	476	205	34
Rick Wamsley	1979	58	407	204	12
Gilles Gilbert	1969	25	416	192	18
Glen Hanlon	1977	40	476	167	13
Thomas Greiss	2004	94	368	162	16

Patrick Roy won 551 games and was taken 51st overall. Mike Vernon went 56th and won 385. Ken Dryden went in the third round too, and his line is the strangest in the table: 258 wins against 57 losses in 397 games, a ratio no other goaltender here approaches. Those three are the Hall of Famers.

Below them, the round keeps producing. Jonathan Quick won 410 games from pick 72 and Chris Osgood 401 from pick 54, which is two more goaltenders above 400 wins out of a single round. Three more are still playing: Frederik Andersen has passed 300 wins, Jordan Binnington more than 180, and Ilya Sorokin more than 150.

How many 3rd round NHL draft picks ever reach the NHL

673 skaters and 92 goaltenders taken in a third round have played an NHL game. Of those 765 players, 58 skaters reached 400 points and 26 goaltenders won 100 games.

Seven are in the Hockey Hall of Fame. That is a better rate than the seventh round, which has produced two from 357 players, and it is still a reminder of what a mid-draft pick is worth: fewer than one in 100 third-round picks who make the league becomes an inducted player.

Why the best NHL players drafted late resist comparison across eras

There is a trap in every article about a specific draft round, and it is worth naming rather than hiding.

The third round has not meant the same thing twice. Ken Dryden was a third-round pick, and he went 14th overall, because the 1964 draft ran four rounds and 24 selections in total. Patrick Sharp was also a third-round pick, and he went 95th because the 2001 draft ran nine rounds. In a modern seven-round draft, pick 14 sits in the middle of the first round.

So the round label describes where a team was in its own list of choices, not how deeply buried the player was. Across the players in the two tables above, the third round covers picks from 14th overall to 95th. Any sentence of the form “a third-round pick became a Hall of Famer” means something different in 1964 than in 2001, and both are true.