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2026.10.12@hockeyagent

The tweet in this TikTok lists 240 second-round picks on NHL rosters; the NHL's own opening-day numbers leave 329 players for all of rounds 2 through 7 combined

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A 52.13 second portrait clip, 720x1280 at an aspect ratio of 0.56, delivered as a QuickTime/MP4 container (ffprobe format_name mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2) holding an HEVC/H.265 Main profile video stream at level 120, pixel format yuv420p, a constant 30/1 frames per second across 1,564 frames at 101,883 bits per second, alongside an AAC HE-AACv2 stereo audio stream at 44,100 Hz and 48,151 bits per second across 1,125 frames; the overall container bitrate is 156,845 bits per second and the file is 1,022,109 bytes, or 998.2 KiB, pulled as format id bytevc1_720p_156843-1. The video stream runs 52.133333 seconds and the audio stream 52.080907 seconds. It was posted at epoch 1791831668, which is 2026-10-12 19:01:08 UTC, by handle @hockeyagent (uploader_id 7406044340493927470) under the nickname SollyHockeyAgent, with the audio credited as "original sound" by SollyHockeyAgent rather than a licensed track. The description is 112 characters: "Looking at the numbers, when were current NHL players drafted? #nhl #hockey #nhldraft #hockeytok #collegehockey". At capture time, metadata.json epoch 1792387625 which is 2026-10-19 05:27:05 UTC, the post showed 5,357 views, 159 likes, 5 comments, 7 reposts and 15 saves. I read 12 frames spanning the whole clip: frame_001 at 0 s, frame_002 at 2 s, frame_003 at 4 s, frame_004 at 6 s, frame_006 at 10 s, frame_010 at 18 s, frame_012 at 22 s, frame_015 at 28 s, frame_018 at 34 s, frame_020 at 38 s, frame_023 at 44 s and frame_026 at 50 s, plus one 4x upscaled crop of the number column taken at 6 s to confirm the digits. The transcript is 183 words across 12 segments. Every frame shows the same thing: a screenshot of an X post rendered in dark mode, header "Post", author line "Jason Gregor" with a blue verified check and "@JasonGregor", an "X.com" watermark top right, and the speaker's head and shoulders composited over the lower middle of the post in a 720x1280 rectangle that covers roughly a third of the text. The post body reads verbatim "Current NHL rosters (including injured) and where the players came from:", then "Round 1: 304", "Round 2: 240", "Round 3: 69", "Round 4: 58", "Round 5: 36", "Round 6: 27", "Round 7: 19", "Undrafted: 89", then a partly occluded caption that reads "Great case study [obscured] are more undrafted players [obscured] und between 3-7." followed by "#NHL" in blue. The post timestamp reads "2:03 PM · 9/29" with the year clipped by the speaker overlay, the reply counter shows 6, and the footer shows "Relevant" and "View quotes". For the first four seconds only, frame_001 and frame_002 carry a TikTok title overlay in large white type reading "NHL Rosters by Round Drafted", and that overlay sits directly on top of the Round 1 and Round 2 lines, so the two largest numbers in the graphic are hidden for the opening four seconds and then revealed from frame_003 onward. No roster table, no per-player list, no NHL.com page, no methodology note, no link and no year on the tweet timestamp appear in any frame I read. Spoken, the argument is that the first two rounds supply most NHL players, that undrafted players are the third largest group, and that late picks and undrafted players should not be discouraged because physical maturity and a full junior or college career take time. The transcript's last segment ends at 52.08 s against an audio stream duration of 52.080907 s, so there is no Whisper hallucination past the end of audio in this file.

What the frames actually show is one static screenshot held for the entire 52 seconds

The clip does not contain a chart, an animation or a data visualization. It contains a photograph of someone else's social post, held without motion from 0 s to 50 s across every frame I read, with a talking head composited over it. The person whose byline is on screen is Jason Gregor, whose own site describes him as "a sports talk radio host on Sports 1440 in Edmonton weekdays from 2-6 p.m." and "the lead columnist on OilersNation.com", having "began his radio career in 2001" and hosted his own show "since 2003". The spelling on screen, Jason Gregor, matches his site.

The speaker is @hockeyagent, nickname SollyHockeyAgent, an account that posts about the business side of hockey from an agent's perspective. I could not read the profile page: a fetch of https://www.tiktok.com/@hockeyagent returned only the generic TikTok shell with no bio, follower count or stated agency, so I am not asserting anything about the creator's identity or credentials beyond the handle and nickname in metadata.json.

I also could not retrieve the Gregor post itself, so everything I quote from it comes from the video frames. That is why the clipped "9/29" matters: the year is never visible on screen. The date can be pinned anyway, because the content matches a specific morning.

The eight on-screen buckets sum to 842, and the NHL counted 723 players on rosters that same morning

At 0.00 s the video opens with "Let's take a look at current NHL rosters and see where players were drafted." The eight numbers on screen add up as follows: 304 plus 240 is 544, plus 69 is 613, plus 58 is 671, plus 36 is 707, plus 27 is 734, plus 19 is 753, plus 89 is 842. So the graphic describes a population of 842 players.

The NHL's own count for the same day is 723. NHL Public Relations published "By the Numbers: 2026-27 NHL Opening-Day Rosters" on September 29, 2026, headed "Based on opening-day rosters, as of 10 a.m. ET, on Sept. 29, 2026, excluding Injured and/or Non-Roster players". Its first line is "723 – Players on official opening-day rosters." The 2026-27 regular season began that same day; the NHL's roster announcement says "The 2026-27 regular season begins today", and the By the Numbers release refers to Toronto hosting "the first game of Sportsnet's doubleheader tonight (7 ET)". Gregor's post is timestamped 2:03 PM on 9/29, about four hours after the NHL's 10 a.m. ET snapshot.

The gap between 842 and 723 is 119 players, which is roughly 3.7 per club. That is a plausible size for the Injured and/or Non-Roster lists the NHL publishes alongside each opening roster, and the post explicitly says "including injured". So far the two populations can be reconciled. Two of the eight buckets then break that reconciliation.

The first is Round 1. The NHL release includes a table, "Most First-Round NHL Draft Picks on 2026-27 Opening-Day Rosters", listing all 32 clubs: St. Louis 13; Dallas, Minnesota and Philadelphia 12 each; Calgary, Chicago, Edmonton, Montreal, the New York Islanders, San Jose, Utah, Washington and Winnipeg 11 each; Buffalo, Colorado, Columbus, Florida and Vancouver 10 each; Los Angeles, New Jersey and Ottawa 9 each; Anaheim, Boston, Detroit, the New York Rangers and Toronto 8 each; Carolina, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Vegas 7 each; Nashville and Tampa Bay 6 each. Those 32 entries sum to 305. That is 305 first-round picks in a population that excludes injured players. Gregor lists 304 in a population that claims to include them. A larger population cannot contain fewer first-rounders, so the 304 is at minimum one short, and more likely several short once injured first-rounders are added back.

The second is Undrafted. The NHL release states "89 – Undrafted players (12.3% of 723)." The graphic also says 89, but calls it 10.6 percent of its own 842. One number cannot simultaneously describe 723 players and 842 players. The undrafted figure in the graphic is the NHL's excluding-injured figure, lifted into a table that claims a 119-player larger scope.

Round 2 at 240 is the broken number, because official arithmetic leaves 329 for all of rounds 2 through 7 combined

This is the correction that matters. Take the NHL's three published facts for September 29, 2026: 723 players total, 305 of them first-round picks by the sum of the league's own team table, and 89 undrafted. Subtract: 723 minus 305 minus 89 leaves 329. Those 329 players are everyone drafted in rounds 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, put together.

The graphic assigns 449 players to rounds 2 through 7: 240 plus 69 plus 58 plus 36 plus 27 plus 19. That is 120 more players than the entire official rounds 2 through 7 population, and the overage is larger than the 119-player allowance that injured and non-roster additions could plausibly explain, even if every one of those 119 were a mid-round pick, which they would not be.

Round 2 alone carries the problem. At 240, round 2 would be 72.9 percent of the official rounds 2 through 7 total of 329, leaving 89 players to cover five full rounds. Accept the graphic's own rounds 3 through 7 figures, which sum to 209, and the implied round 2 count is 329 minus 209, which is 120. A round 2 figure somewhere near 120 to 140 is what the official totals will support. A figure of 240 is not.

The shape of the real distribution supports the smaller number. Jokke Nevalainen's analysis of the 2000 through 2009 draft classes for DobberProspects found that "74 per cent" of first round picks reached 100 NHL games while "only 34 per cent" of second round picks did, which he describes as "a massive drop-off between the top two rounds." Kevin Allen, writing for HockeyBuzz on June 27, 2026 and using the 2010 through 2021 classes, puts first-round success at "69% (251/364)" for 200 NHL games against second-round success of "34% of time", with the second round splitting into "67/187, 35.8%" for the first half and "58/181, 32%" for the second. Both samples put the first round at roughly double the second round's hit rate. Rosters reflect that: 305 first-rounders against something in the neighborhood of 120 to 150 second-rounders, not 304 against 240.

I want to be precise about what I can and cannot source. The NHL does not publish a round-by-round breakdown beyond the first round in either the 2026-27 or the 2025-26 release, and QuantHockey's draft-round page returned HTTP 403 when I tried to fetch it, so I have no independent published count for round 2. What I have is arithmetic on the league's own published totals, and that arithmetic rules out 240.

"Overwhelming majority" of first or second round survives as a majority and fails as overwhelming

At 4.32 s the video says "No surprise here, but overwhelming majority of NHL players were drafted in the first or second round." On the graphic's numbers, rounds 1 and 2 are 544 of 842, which is 64.6 percent. That reading depends entirely on the 240 that the official totals rule out.

Run the same claim on numbers that survive. First-rounders are 305 of 723, which is 42.2 percent. For rounds 1 and 2 to clear half the league, round 2 needs at least 57 players, which it comfortably has. Using the 120 implied by the graphic's own rounds 3 through 7, rounds 1 and 2 come to 425 of 723, or 58.8 percent. That is a majority, and the video's directional point holds. It is not the 64.6 percent the graphic shows, and "overwhelming" is doing work that a 58.8 percent share does not earn when 41 percent of the league came from somewhere else.

The prior season behaves the same way, which is a useful stability check. The 2025-26 release, headed "Based on opening-day rosters, as of 11:15 a.m. ET, on Oct. 7, 2025, excluding Injured and/or Non-Roster players", reports "726 – Players on official opening-day rosters" and "91 – Undrafted players (12.5% of 726)." Its first-round table sums to 303 across the same 32 clubs. That leaves 726 minus 303 minus 91, or 332, for rounds 2 through 7, against 329 this season. First-round share moved from 41.7 percent to 42.2 percent in a year. Nothing in that two-season comparison allows a 240-player second round.

Undrafted at 89 is exactly right, and it is the only figure in the graphic the NHL publishes

At 9.12 s the video says "And one of my favorite stats to share, but the third largest category of NHL players is undrafted." At 14.10 s it continues, "is undrafted. It can be detrimental to a player's career when you rush them to pro hockey."

The 89 checks out against the primary source word for word: "89 – Undrafted players (12.3% of 723)." The year-over-year context also checks out: 91 undrafted, or 12.5 percent of 726, on 2025-26 opening day. The undrafted group is roughly one in eight NHL players and has been for at least two seasons.

Whether undrafted is the third largest category depends on the broken round 2 figure. On the graphic's numbers it ranks behind 304 and 240. On the corrected arithmetic, with the first round at 305 and the second round near 120, undrafted at 89 still ranks third, ahead of a third round that the graphic puts at 69. The video's headline stat holds even after the error underneath it is removed, which is worth saying plainly because the correction does not damage the claim the creator built the video around.

The post's caption, as far as it is legible through the speaker overlay, claims there are more undrafted players than in any round between 3 and 7. On the graphic's own figures that is true, since 89 exceeds 69, 58, 36, 27 and 19. I cannot verify it independently, because the NHL publishes no counts for rounds 3 through 7. I am marking it plausible and unverified rather than confirmed.

Celebrini and Bedard are the right examples, and the transcript misspells one of them

At 28.70 s the video says "and except for some of these freaks of nature like Macklin Celebrini and Conor Bedard, it's very rare to have young players thriving like this in the NHL."

Both players are correctly chosen and one is misspelled in the transcript. Hockey-Reference gives Macklin Celebrini a birth date of June 13, 2006, a current team of San Jose, and the draft line "San Jose, 1st round (1st overall), 2024 NHL Entry". It gives Connor Bedard a birth date of July 17, 2005, a current team of Chicago, and the draft line "Chicago, 1st round (1st overall), 2023 NHL Entry". The spelling is Connor Bedard with two n's. The transcript renders it "Conor Bedard", which is a Whisper transcription error rather than something the creator necessarily said, and the name does not appear on screen in any frame I read.

The framing is slightly behind the calendar. Measured against the roster snapshot date of September 29, 2026, Celebrini was 20 years and 108 days old and Bedard was 21 years and 74 days old. Neither is a teenager any more, and the league's genuinely young cohort that season is a different set of names. The NHL release says "12 – Teenagers, including five 18-year-olds (all first-round picks in the 2026 NHL Draft)" and names the five members of the 2026 draft class on opening rosters: "Gavin McKenna (TOR; No. 1), Ivar Stenberg (SJS; No. 2), Alberts Smits (NYR; No. 5), Viggo Bjorck (WPG; No. 8) and Nikita Klepov (ANA; No. 15)." Twelve teenagers out of 723 players is 1.7 percent, which makes the video's point about rarity harder than the two names it uses.

The broader age picture also supports the patience argument the video is making. The same release reports "34 – Percentage of players age 25 or younger (243 of 723)" and "283 – Players born in the 2000s (up from 232 last year), amounting to 39% of the League (each team carries at least three)." Two thirds of the league is 26 or older. That is the number that backs the claim at 41.64 s, "for most, the path to pro hockey is a long, grueling process."

Key Takeaways

  • Correction: The graphic says "Round 2: 240". The NHL's published totals for September 29, 2026 leave 329 players for rounds 2 through 7 combined (723 total, minus 305 first-rounders summed from the league's own team table, minus 89 undrafted). The graphic assigns 449 to those rounds, 120 more than exist. Accepting its rounds 3 through 7 figures implies a round 2 count of about 120.
  • Correction: The graphic says "Round 1: 304" for a population that "includ[es] injured". The NHL's team-by-team table sums to 305 first-round picks in a population that explicitly excludes injured and non-roster players. A larger population cannot hold fewer first-rounders.
  • Correction: The eight buckets sum to 842 players. The NHL counted 723 on opening-day rosters as of 10 a.m. ET on September 29, 2026, four hours before the post's 2:03 PM timestamp.
  • Verified: "Undrafted: 89" matches the NHL exactly. The league release reads "89 – Undrafted players (12.3% of 723)." The prior season was 91, or 12.5 percent of 726.
  • Partial correction: At 4.32 s the video says an "overwhelming majority of NHL players were drafted in the first or second round." On the graphic's numbers that is 64.6 percent. On the official first-round count plus a corrected round 2 it is about 58.8 percent, a majority but not an overwhelming one. First-rounders alone are 42.2 percent of the league.
  • Verified: The video's core claim that undrafted is the third largest category survives the correction. At 89 it still ranks behind the first round at 305 and a second round near 120, and ahead of the third round.
  • Clarification: Macklin Celebrini (born June 13, 2006; San Jose; 1st round, 1st overall, 2024) and Connor Bedard (born July 17, 2005; Chicago; 1st round, 1st overall, 2023) are named correctly, but the transcript spells the second "Conor Bedard". Neither was a teenager on the roster snapshot date; the NHL counted 12 teenagers out of 723 players, including five 18-year-olds all taken in the 2026 first round.
  • Context: Draft-round hit rates from two independent samples put the first round at roughly double the second round, 74 percent against 34 percent for 100 games in the 2000-2009 classes and 69 percent against 34 percent for 200 games in the 2010-2021 classes. A roster split of 304 to 240 between rounds 1 and 2 is inconsistent with both.
  • Unverified: The post's caption claim that undrafted players outnumber any single round from 3 through 7 is true on its own figures but cannot be independently confirmed, because the NHL publishes no counts beyond the first round.
  • Context: The clip is one static screenshot of someone else's X post held for all 52 seconds, with a talking head composited over roughly a third of it. For the first four seconds a TikTok title overlay reading "NHL Rosters by Round Drafted" covers the Round 1 and Round 2 lines, and the tweet's year is never visible on screen.

Resources

Sources I could not reach: QuantHockey's NHL Players by Draft Round page returned HTTP 403, TikTok's @hockeyagent profile page returned no readable account content, and I found no retrievable x.com link to the Jason Gregor post itself, so the post text here is transcribed from the video frames rather than from X.

Published October 12, 2026. Writeup generated from a favorited TikTok.