Yesterday Reid Wilkins of 630 CHED in Edmonton had Bill Daly on the show. In the conversation he had with the Deputy Commissioner of the NHL, Reid asked the NHL’s number two man about the possibility of an “Oiler Rule”.
You can hear it by following this link.
Edmonton has infamously chosen 1st in 4 of the last 6 Drafts, including 3 in a row and most recently to take the NHL’s latest generational talent.
That’s a lot to take for opposing fan-bases and the media who pretend not to be a part of those fan-bases. Edmonton has become a symbol of evil when it comes to the NHL Draft, and I get it. I do. Drafting at the top of the order in the NHL is a big deal. It gets you a fantastic player more often than not and sometimes it gets you a franchise altering player.
So when a single team dominates the lottery to such a degree that winning the top prize so many times in a short period of time reaches unprecedented levels, there is going to be a lot of pushback. There’s a sense out there that the draft should be a “fair” process that distributes talent around the league.
That, of course, is ridiculous. The Draft has never been about distributing talented young players fairly around the NHL. The Draft, any Draft, is about distributing talented young players to teams that need them the most. That’s why the worst teams in the NHL have traditionally chosen 1st or 2nd.
In a classic knee-jerk way, the NHL already addressed the Oilers’ particular brand of ineptitude by altering the way the lottery works. The league opened up the NHL lottery to include the first, second, and third picks in the draft. This means that the team finishing dead last is guaranteed nothing more than the 4th Overall selection in the draft.
In the NHL Draft, the difference between prospects ranked 1 and 4 is comparable to the difference between a perfectly cooked steak from that place you can’t afford and your favourite burger at Wendy’s.
Still, even though Edmonton has better than a 60% chance to pick outside of the top 3, that isn’t enough for everyone. Some are calling for an Oiler rule that makes teams ineligible for lottery wins if they select high “too often”. As I’ve been setting it up longer than I should have anyway, here’s Bill Daly’s response to an “Oiler Rule”.
But I do think it runs contrary to what the whole draft is supposed to be about, which is you want to give the clubs who finished poorly a chance to get better. So you want to give them an advantage in the next season’s Draft. And I think that whole philosophy of a Draft in professional sports always has been. And I think you want to maintain that at least as a concept. And then you can work around issues that come up over time, but I’m not sure kind of limiting a team to the number of 1st round picks over a period of time makes sense to me personally, but again I’m not making the decisions ultimately.
It is reassuring, to me, that Bill Daly hasn’t lost sight of what the Draft is supposed to accomplish. Bad teams need better players to climb out of the basement. They need competent coaching and management too, and that has been a challenge for the Oilers until recently, but it’s still about finding good players.
So when the Oilers win the lottery again on Saturday, I’ll be expecting 29 other fan-bases to roll their eyes. I’ll be expecting 4-5 to protest pretty loudly. I’ll be expecting Toronto to riot in the streets. I’ll be expecting Sportsnet and TSN to become unwatchable for at least 1 week. However, I won’t be expecting the NHL to abandon the principles of its own Draft just because Edmonton defied the odds in a game of chance.
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