The NHL will finalize the draft order among the 15 teams that did not make the playoffs (in addition to the Seattle Kraken expansion team) Wednesday night at 7 pm. The Sabres – as the worst team in the league – have the best odds of winning at 16.6%. In advance of the lottery, let’s talk some history of the draft lottery, its purpose and whether it should continue into the future.
Until the 1995 NHL draft, the order of the teams was determined by their place in the standings. This system of awarding the worst team the #1 overall pick still works great in the NFL and the MLB, but the NHL likes to do things that it finds fun and different, so that system was out and something new and different was brought in. Between 1995 and 2012, teams could move up four places which essentially meant that the bottom five teams in the league were in contention for the first overall selection. This system also made sense, but the NHL didn’t like it either and decided to keep messing with it. The continued tinkering post-2012 usually resulted in wackier and zanier ideas that really added nothing positive to the equation.
All this stupidity culminated in the dumbest system of all time in 2020. Due to the pandemic, the NHL had a 24-team “return to play… tournament, but the first round was not technically considered to be part of the Stanley Cup Playoffs (because NHL reasons). The players’ statistics from these games were listed as playoff stats though, so that was super clear and not at all confusing.
To make this situation even weirder, the NHL decided to do a two-part lottery drawing that would include the eight teams that lost in the play-in round even though those teams hadn’t been decided yet. Of course one of these placeholder teams ended up winning the lottery, but we had to wait for part two of the lottery at the conclusion of the “not-playoffs… before learning which team actually won.
Still with me?
Allow me to try to simplify what was going on: the 8 teams that lost in the first round of the not-playoffs would join the 7 teams not included in the return to play as eligible to win the NHL draft lottery. The Rangers ended up winning the lottery.
This year’s plan is less convoluted as only the first two spots are up for grabs and there are no placeholders or mystery teams or teams winning the lottery while playing in the playoffs, but the question should still be asked: why go through any of this nonsense? Just let the worst team pick first. Forget that I’m the Sabres blogger here for a minute because this genuinely has nothing to do with me wanting the Sabres to pick first. It just makes sense to have the worst team pick first. In 2016, the Toronto Maple Leafs were the worst team in the league and they won the lottery which meant that they stayed in the first overall position and drafted Auston Matthews.
What’s wrong with that? The Leafs were bad and they got a good player. That’s the way this should work.
Ostensibly the reason for the draft lottery is to discourage tanking. The league clearly thinks that tanking is a problem and that bad teams should be punished for being bad teams that are better should be rewarded for icing a more competitive team.
Well, not so fast. Commissioner Gary Bettman says tanking doesn’t exist in the NHL
"I don't believe there's tanking in the game. I think our players, and our organizations, our coaches, are too professional,… Bettman said in March.
I do not believe Bettman, of course, because there very much is tanking. Anyone who watched the 2014 Buffalo Sabres ice a team with Matt D’Agostini, Zenon Kenopka and Linus Omark knows that tanking is very real. The problem is that the introduction of the lottery essentially doubles the punishment of tanking on the fan base: the first punishment is watching terrible, awful, no-good hockey and the second punishment is picking fourth instead of first. This is the exact scenario that befell the Detroit Red Wings last year as they finished last and ended up picking fourth. After going through that misery it makes sense for the league to extend an olive branch to the team and give them a good pick to make it feel like the year wasn’t a total waste of time.
For the sake of argument though, let’s take Bettman at his word that he doesn’t believe that tanking exists in the sport. What in God’s name is the point of any of this zany, wacky nonsense with the draft lottery then? If we remove tanking as the reason for the lottery, then there is no good reason for any of it. It’s like if Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory didn’t have a morality tale involving kids and their bad behavior. At that point it’s just a weird chocolatier taking confused adults on a psychedelic boat ride while OSHA inspects the working conditions of the Oompa Loompas.
Even if you think tanking is a problem and a scourge on the sport it still does not make sense to punish the teams like Detroit who didn’t choose to be bad so much as they simply came to the end of the road with a lot of veteran players retiring and had some bad contracts which hindered them. There is a spectrum of reasons why a team could be bad. The simplest solution is for the league to extend a hand and help bad teams find a way out of the gutter rather than prioritize randomness as some sort of counterforce to tanking. Just draft based on the standings.