I haven't stopped smiling since Saturday night. Nothing can bring me down, though many have tried since Bill Daly looked upon the golden card and announced that we had a winner. I've heard so much about who "Deserved" Connor McDavid and how the Oilers most certainly did not deserve the honour of winning the lottery.
First I should say this, the tears of Eastern writers sustains me. There is absolutely nothing that someone who cheers for the Maple Leafs (and make no mistake, these guys cheer for the Leafs) can say that will make me feel bad about the Oilers drafting Connor McDavid.
As much as the jealous sniping and whining amuses me, it should embarrass the media guys who are doing it. It's about as unprofessional as you can possibly get to cry about the way a random process played out.
The NHL Draft is about making sure bad teams can acquire good players so they will no longer be bad. It's how the NHL ensures that there won't be any zombie franchises who exist somewhere between the realm of the living and the dead.
The Lottery is the process by which the NHL makes sure teams don't purposefully lose games in order to ensure they can choose their own Draft ranking. It's the thing that's set up to prevent teams from gaming the system.
NHL teams were so unhappy with what the Oilers were doing from 2009-2012 that they changed the rules to lower the odds of winning the lottery for the worst teams and they expanded the teams that could claim 1st Overall to include everybody out of the playoffs. So the NHL took direct action against "The Tank".
Did that stop Arizona, the Leafs, and (most egregiously) the Sabres from Tanking?
No. It did not.
Arizona was winning too many games because Dubnyk was standing on his head so they traded him away. The Leafs very publicly bit on a tear it down rebuild that involved shipping good players away for picks. They even traded for a player whose career is over. And the Sabres traded both of their goalies and their best Defenseman with the biggest return being a guy with questionable character and even more questionable shoulder ligaments.
Buffalo wasn't even trying to hide the fact that they wanted to be the worst team in the NHL for the sole purpose of getting the best odds of drafting McDavid. Hilariously, Tim Murray seemed legitimately shocked that he lost the lottery despite the fact that there was an 80% chance he would lose.
I've never seen an NHL executive be such an absolute crybaby over the fact that he has to draft 2nd Overall. How does Jack Eichel feel about that? He Jack, your future GM knew there would be a 4/5 shot he would be drafting you but still apologized to the fans that they have to take you on Draft day. Congrats!
Now the Oilers weren't bad because they were trying to throw games. They were bad the old fashioned way: via unmatched incompetence. Management failed to properly address the Center position until the midway point of the year, refused to negotiate with their best Defenseman, and goaltending failed them completely. Mix that with some Dallas Eakins magic (thanks Eastern Media for hyping him so much) and you get a recipe for finishing 28th Overall.
Even then, they could have accepted a fate much worse than what they ended up with. The fact is that the team fired their failed coach, found a Center for the 2nd line, and pulled their W/L around in the last half of the year. Nelson finished 17-22-7 with a team that had league worst goaltending, Hall injured for most of the time, and both Perron and Petry traded away by the deadline.
The Oilers drafted 1st Overall 3 years in a row then drafted 7th and 3rd the following years. Should that have been enough to no longer be horrawful? You bet, but nobody outside of the marginalized blogging community is trying to hold management accountable, so the members of the media who refused to pressure the team to make changes before doesn't have a right to complain when all that incompetence leads to draft day rewards.
And it's laughable for anybody to suggest that these teams that made a mockery of the NHL by actively tanking are somehow more deserving of winning Connor McDavid. Tim Murray and the Sabres got exactly what they they were owed for finishing dead last on purpose. They were promised an 80% chance to pick 2nd and that's exactly what they got.
I don't buy anybody claiming they wanted McDavid to go to another market because it would be good for the NHL either. Let's not BS each other. If Steve Simmons or Bruce Arthur or Pierre LeBrun want McDavid in another market they want it to happen because deep down they're fans of that team. They can hide behind faux professionalism all they want but their true colours showed this past weekend.
Some like LeBrun would simply ignore the fact that Edmonton finished the year trying to actually win games. this quote is hilariously off base:
No, if the hockey gods existed at all, they would have been smiling their faces at a team like the Columbus Blue Jackets, one that didn’t stain the reputation of the league like a few others did by deliberately tanking their seasons to get a shot at McDavid.
I guess the fact that the only team in the bottom 5 that wasn't tanking really did win the lottery wasn't enough for LeBrun. Maybe the Hockey gods were smiling today. If they're anything like the Greek or Roman gods the kind of Hubris displayed by the likes of Buffalo and Toronto never go unpunished.
Others like Bruce Arthur hid their sheer jealousy better with prose as intoxicating as the message was petty.
Still, Canada, we should not root for McDavid to fail. There’s a chance McDavid will be ruined, wasted, less than he could be, but that’s at least partly up to him. Nobody’s career goes in a straight line, anyway. Gretzky played in St. Louis for a while.
Aw, that's so big of you, Bruce, to not root against McDavid. I'm sure the Oilers will be every bit the part of this kid's legacy as St. Louis was for Gretzky. We'll try to live up to such lofty expectations.
Cry your hearts out. It makes no difference to me. The Oilers were given nothing more than what they deserved and that's an 11.5 percent chance to win the Lottery. Their numbers were called and now they will most certainly draft the best prospect since Sidney Crosby.
All I ask is that we stop crying about who "deserved" to win the 1st pick. A bad team that didn't try to lose games on purpose will Draft 1st this summer, and that's exactly the way it should be.