Backdrafting

A question came up on BigSoccer about how many players taken in the supplemntal draft wound up being signed for their team, which got me wanting to clear up something I had done when I started loking at the draft figures for 2012. Namely, who, from 2011, was still playing for their team in 2012, and how much playing time were they seeing?

From what I was able to track down, it looks like 25 out of 54 players saw action in 2012. The first 11 players taken saw significant playing time. Those guys were :

Omar Salgado
Darlington Nagbe
Perry Kitchen
Zarek Valentin
Zac MacMath
A. J. Soares
Kofi Sarkodie
Michael Nanchoff
Jalil Anibaba
C. J. Sapong
Will Bruin
After that it became kind of a crapshoot, with not a lot of correlation between position picked in 2011 and playing time from 2012. Here's what the graph looked like.

For those players who saw playing time, the average amount of minutes played was 1,528, almost exactly a half season, but you can see from the graph this bounces around a bit. Some guys played a lot, and some guys played almost none.

Of course this doesnt take into accoun players who are "projects" and never anticipated to start immediatly, or players who left the league for greener pastures, or left due to injury, but it seems to make a bit of sense that picks #1 - 10 will tend to stick around while players taken later on will have a broader range of success.