In any draft, you need to evaluate the player pool and determine what each player is worth based on a variety of factors. Examples of these are: team philosophy (what your strengths are), building around your player core (retentions), and team balance, just to name a few. From a front office aspect, navigating the draft and hitting on your picks is the first step towards scaling the mountain to contend for a title. You can’t win the league on draft day, but you can lose it.
As we’re nearing the end of the 7th edition of the PSL, I thought this would be a great time to look back at the performance of players and where they were drafted. Let’s begin with the batters - below is a graph looking at the boundary rate and strike rate excluding boundaries (SREB) of every batter with a minimum of 60 balls faced up until the end of match 30 - I stopped at this point to not include metrics from the pressure cooker of the knockout phase.
If you’re not familiar, a quick explanation of SREB - while boundary rate is a great metric to evaluate, we also need to look at how quickly a player is scoring when they’re not sending the ball to the ropes or into the stands. Said another way, when faced with good or great deliveries, what is their production like?
Looking at the graph above, we ideally want to be in the top right quadrant. That’s obviously a dream scenario, so a more realistic approach is to target somewhere in the grouping in the middle right - a high boundary rate, and an average to above average SREB. I highlighted a few particular names on here, but feel free to DM me if there is a name you’re curious about that wasn’t named here.
Before the draft, fans were up in arms that Lahore had not retained Fakhar. Perhaps they had not realized that they could only retain 2 platinum level players and had the first overall pick. Given that he is a reliable domestic opener who can be lethal in the powerplay, it felt like a no brainer to me.
As we saw, they did pick him first, and he’s rewarded that faith and will likely finish as the tournament top run scorer with an above average boundary rate and SREB. Similarly, Multan was questioned for using their wild card to elevate Tim David to the platinum tier and select him first - it definitely paid off. Below is the full list of everyone from the platinum tier (retained or drafted).
Keep in mind the average mentioned above (SREB was 66.11, BR 18.10%) is for all batters in the league - so you’d expect, or hope, that your platinum & diamond tier players are above that mark. Similarly, if a player from a silver tier or below was above that, they’d be outperforming the draft capital they were allocated to.
As an example, Asif Ali was promoted from the gold tier to the platinum tier after his world cup heroics (Narrator voice: yet another example of recency bias coming into play), and relative to what was expected of him has underperformed. Compare that to Alex Hales, who was downgraded from platinum to gold, and he’s overperformed in kind. Funny how that works out.
I’d argue that if you’re consistently opening and your boundary rate isn’t above 18% for the tournament, something is wrong. Moreover, if you aren’t hitting boundaries and your SREB isn’t way above average, something is really wrong. Look at it this way: if your batting isn’t attacking hard in the powerplay and finishing with a middling score of 35-40, you’re essentially giving your opponent a 15% head start in the race. I don’t think you’ll see Lewis Hamilton agree to doing that, so why should your team operate in kind?
A few things from the collective data:
Karachi in particular had many players underperform to expectations, as seen by their dismal stats. On top of that, the franchise hamstrung themselves with their early draft picks (more on that later). One name I want to highlight is the player they used their RTM card on, emerging player - Qasim Akram. While he only got a few matches due to the U-19 World Cup, I thought he impressed and he’s clearly one to watch.
I think it’s worth pointing out that Multan absolutely nailed their picks. They have consistently topped the charts and their middle order has consistently delivered. It will be a shame if Tim David can’t play in the final as he’s a big part of the equation, but even if he can’t, it will take a lot to beat them.
For all the flack and hate Azam Khan gets, I don’t think he deserves it. If he improves his fitness and can turn those ones into twos, he has the potential to be a menace for fielding sides in the middle overs.
It’s pretty clear that some teams allocated their draft capital poorly and while I won’t discuss every player, I have provided the numbers for the top 3 draft tiers instead.
Let’s move on to the bowling with similar parameters (minimum 60 balls bowled) while analyzing the dot ball % and boundary conceded %.
Imran Khan barely makes the cut (64 balls) and expands the graph a bit due to his dot ball %, and while I’ve included him above, let’s make the data a bit easier to read without him.
First and foremost, Shadab Khan, even with the games he missed, is the player of the tournament for mine. He outperformed his diamond tier retention by a long way, had excellent numbers across both batting and bowling - and was far and away the best bowler in the tournament - and he might finish as the top wicket taker despite missing multiple games!
I have so many questions for Karachi. They made Chris Jordan their first pick from the platinum round. I know that the draft happened a week before England announced their squad for the West Indies T20 matches, but Jordan is a mainstay in that squad and was going to miss a minimum of 4 matches due to the schedule (he ended up missing 5). Either they thought he wasn’t going to be selected, didn’t do due diligence on the schedule, or had bad intel on availability. Whatever the case, he’s been going around the park lately and you need your top picks to be main contributors, not someone you have for half the tournament. Meanwhile, Multan picked up Muzarabani and Willey in the supplemental rounds. Was Jordan really the best Karachi could do?
Moving on, Islamabad is going to need to fix their bowling as they can’t stop a nosebleed. They are incredibly expensive at the death overs, and they don’t take enough wickets. I don’t think they need a complete makeover, but they need to make some adjustments to their balance or they will continue to suffer the consequences.
Quick thoughts:
Rashid Khan has said he’d play on a lower tier to stay with Lahore next year if he has to. If that comes to fruition, the draft dynamics would put the league on high alert.
Conversely, as long as Quetta continue to allocate a platinum tier slot to Sarfaraz, they’re going to struggle. He’s not performing at that level anymore, and it’s preventing them from obtaining someone who can.
Ditto for Peshawar with Wahab, although I suspect you’ll see him at that tier for one more year before reality sinks in. Additionally, Livingstone played 4 of Peshawar’s first 10 matches and faced a mere 35 balls. I assume he’s in their long term plans, but based off this year alone, the plan hasn’t panned out well.
Look at how many players Multan had that performed above the tournament average. If they lose in the final, it will either be due to the pressure of being the first team to repeat as champions, or a perfect day out for Lahore. Fakhar has a tendency to perform in big games, and Shaheen is due for a first wicket over, something he does 33% of the time but hasn’t in a few matches (even though he has struck in his 2nd over instead). And while there are rumblings that Rashid Khan may return for the final, I expect Multan to win. The stage is set for a cracking final and I can’t wait to watch.
I’m not a huge fan of the requirement that a number of your early picks need to be foreign players, though I imagine there are monetary reasons for that in order to incentivize the big names.
Finally, teams stick to players they know and tend to favor running things back, even when they should branch out and study beyond what is in the locker room in franchise cricket. I’ll be curious to see a study over a larger sample size, but if we look at the graphs above, I’m almost certain that teams will wrongfully retain some players at a tier higher than they should be in next year.