Quoting: CSStrowbridge
I don't like that chart. It just looks at what trades have happened in the past and assumed they were fair trades. This isn't even close to a good assumption. If you look at odds of a player even playing a single game in the NHL the difference between a 5th round pick and a 7th round pick is very slim, only about 30% more. However, a 5th round draft pick is worth three times what a 7th round draft pick is worth in trade value.
Zipf's law is better and it gives Carolina the win.
The teams probably look at these models as a general guideline, but you can only trade the picks you have, so I suspect it would be rare that the picks would be exactly equal in value. This one is about as close as you’re going to get if 94 + 100 = 72 or 73, but I doubt that they worry about that much. It’s all about who’s available at the time of the pick.
If the guy you want is available, but you think there’s a good chance he’ll be gone by the time your pick comes up, you trade up. It’s a little more risky for the team trading down, because somebody else could pick the guy they want, but if he’s ranked much lower, to the point where he’ll probably still be available when the lower pick comes up, and you have other options that you could live with if he isn’t, you can take a chance and trade down to get yourself an extra pick. (This is what I think Toronto should have done with their 1st-round pick, especially since they didn’t have any more picks until the 5th round. The guy they took was projected to go in the 3rd round, so they probably could have traded down to an early or mid-2nd and still got him.) If both teams got the guy they wanted, they both win.
I saw one list where Perron was ranked ahead of Svoboda. It wasn’t the NHL central scouting list, which is the one that I consider most accurate, so I don’t know how relevant it is, but if the consensus was that Perron was a better pick than Svoboda, then I think you could argue that Carolina won the trade.