The NHL Draft is today, Ryan O'Reilly's future, and Chris Stewart's fantasy relevance.

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Live chat and coverage of the draft here: http://prospects.dobbersports.com/Feature-Story/live-draft-chat-day-1

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The 2015 NHL Entry Draft has finally arrived, which means the new era of the Oilers is about to start (and Buffalo too, guys). There will be enough of that in the coming days, weeks, and months before next season. There is a lot of time to talk about nothing as October approaches.

One aspect I wanted to talk about as it relates to fantasy was an interesting little research piece done by Andi D. over at the Mile High Hockey blog from SB Nation a couple of years ago. It looked at top-10 picks that were defencemen from 2003-2012, and more specifically, the bust rates. I encourage the reader to look at that to see what the names are.

There were 33 defencemen in the sample, and they removed the nine players that hadn't appeared in an NHL game yet to get to 24 total. I didn't include them because I'm not sure about all of them, so I'm going to just not consider them.

Including the four that have appeared in the NHL from the two drafts since (Aaron Ekblad, Seth Jones, Rasmus Ristolainen, and Darnell Nurse), that's a total of 28. They found up to 17 top-4 defencemen (though it's more like 15 with how things have changed since), and by my count, 10 top pair defencemen. So of the 28, that's 10 top true top pairing d-men (in my opinion anyway).