Monday, April 20, 2015

The winners and losers of the McDavid draft lottery

The NHL held its draft lottery Saturday and you probably heard about the results, assuming you know any hockey fans and were wondering why they were swearing loudly while punching holes into their TV screens.

Yes, the perpetually awful Edmonton Oilers won the draft lottery yet again, “earning” the first overall pick for the fourth time in six years. And this year, it’s a big one; the Oilers will get the chance to pick Connor McDavid, the teenage prodigy who almost everyone views as the best prospect to enter the league since Sidney Crosby.

Needless to say, not everyone is thrilled about this. So let’s take some time to sort out the winners and losers from an evening of Ping-Pong balls and bitter tears.

Winner: Edmonton Oilers — McDavid is a very good hockey player, and he will probably make the Oilers a better hockey team. This is the kind of hard-hitting analysis you look to me for.

There’s honestly not much more to add here; McDavid projects as a generational player, the kind who turns franchises around almost single-handedly. The Oilers still have holes all over their lineup, most notably in net and along the blue line, and the team will someday have to figure out how to surround their talented young forwards with the right depth pieces. So yes, there’s work still to be done in Edmonton. But the hockey gods just gave the Oilers’ perpetual rebuild a great big boost.

Winner: Oilers fans — Another obvious one. After all, no fan base in the league has suffered as much over the last quarter-century. Since winning their last Stanley Cup in 1990, the Oilers went from powerhouse to glorified farm team under the league’s old financial system. Since the cap arrived, they’ve only made the playoffs once, a miracle run that went all the way to the Stanley Cup final in 2006 but ended with a heartbreaking loss in Game 7 after their star goalie got hurt. Since then, they’ve been stuck in rebuilding mode for nine consecutive years. It’s not Oilers fans’ fault that management and ownership was incompetent, the argument goes, and they deserve to have something good happen to them for a change. All of which is true. Except …

Winner: Oilers management — … you have to wonder if winning the lottery hasn’t also doomed Oilers fans to that same awful management group for a while longer. After years of failure, Kevin Lowe and friends had to be hanging by a thread — if the team wasn’t going to clean house in the summer, it was only one more lost season away, at most. Now they have McDavid, and the heat gets turned way down. So Oilers fans end up with a franchise player, but it could come at the cost of a few more years of the status quo in the front office.

If you’re an Oilers fan, do you take that trade-off? Uh, yeah. In a second. But it’s probably the only flaw in the McDavid diamond, so it’s worth a mention.

Loser: The NHL — Oilers fans won’t want to hear it, but the truth is that McDavid winding up where he did is probably the worst-case scenario for the league, and everyone outside of Edmonton knows it. He doesn’t go to a major media center where his presence would be most likely to generate a revenue surge for the league. But he also doesn’t go to a struggling market where he can be the savior who brings stability to a franchise that needs it. He’s not exactly going to disappear into obscurity — it’s worth remembering that Wayne Gretzky did just fine in Edmonton — but this wasn’t the result the league would have wanted.

All of which leads us to …

Loser: Conspiracy theorists — There was a ready-made conspiracy all set to go for just about any lottery winner — except Edmonton. Say what you want about the NHL, but at least we know one thing for sure: The league absolutely positively did not rig the lottery.

Loser, but only a little: Buffalo Sabres — The Sabres tanked their entire season to get the no. 1 pick and came away without it, so it’s tempting to view them as the night’s big losers. Even GM Tim Murray didn’t hide his disappointment. But the Sabres still come away with the no. 2 pick, and this year that means Jack Eichel, a player who’d be the clear no. 1 in just about any other year. He’s not McDavid, but he’s a hell of a consolation prize. And since the NHL stupidly insisted on going with a system that guaranteed the 30th-place team a top-two pick, the Sabres were never at risk of losing out on a franchise player. They didn’t win the lottery, but their lost season still ended up as mission accomplished.

>> Read the full post on Grantland




14 comments:

  1. I'll be honest, this year's results have kind of shaken my faith in the Gold method for assigning draft picks - not so much because of the Oilers, but because of the Sabres. As awful as they were, they still managed second place under a hypothetical Gold System. In essence, they'd be in the same place as they are now: tanked the season, got Eichel as a result.

    Maybe the Gold system doesn't discourage tanking as much as we thought it did. After all, if your team tanks so badly that they get eliminated early, they've got ample opportunity to pick up points - the loser point and sheer dumb luck mean it'd be almost impossible for them not to build up a pretty good lead and get themselves in a competitive position. Hell, Edmonton went on a bit of a tear at the end of the year; if they hadn't done that, it's not out of the question for Buffalo to finish first in the draft rankings. Looking at Gold's rankings, it's actually quite remarkable how little things would change under his system. Most teams only moved up or down one place. The only major outliers are Columbus (who would jump from 8th to 3rd) and Arizona (who would drop from 2nd to 7th). That's not exactly an enormous overhaul from what we have now, and it may not do enough to discourage tanking.

    Maybe The Wheel is the answer. Or getting the bottom x teams to swap draft picks, as I suggested on here a few weeks ago.

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    1. It's that reason why I always think the best modification to the Gold system would be: Instead of each team getting their Gold system points based on the moment a team gets eliminated from playoff contention, the Gold System points start for EVERY NHL team, across the board, the moment the FIRST team throughout the league is eliminated from playoff contention (so, for this season: the Gold points start on March 8 on the day the Sabres were officially eliminated from contention, with each team's record counting)- with only the teams out of contention losing their playoff spot.

      Pros to this change:
      -There's a more uniform stat for each team to have a fairer shot at the number one pick.
      -Teams that tanked the whole season don't get a tangible benefit to their tanking early in the season of getting more games to try for the number one pick than better teams would get, making it a riskier option for tanking purposes.
      -Teams that went all-out fighting for a playoff spot, but just fell short at the finish line, get rewarded for their play down the stretch, while the teams that fell apart at the finish line get punished for trying to fall apart to get McDavid. (which could have played an equal role if the chips fell differently late-season: The only thing that could have made Ottawa's miracle run from the dregs to a playoff spot better on the final weekend would have been that knowledge "Either Ottawa takes a wild card spot against all odds, or Boston ends up in the playoffs again- but Ottawa basically assures themselves the Connor McDavid sweepstakes as the best possible consolation prize".

      This also benefits the biggest potential con of: "what if a team that's in one of the wild card spots or in third place in their division decides to shut things down in hopes of getting a McDavid-level player?": Since the won-loss is counted for every team, a team trying to fall out of the playoff race and prefer the chance at a franchise player to a third place or wildcard spot in the playoffs would be asking for a low pick.

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    2. Problem is this does away with distributing talent to the needy teams altogether. The risk is that a bad team stays bad indefinitely. Fan bases lose interest (unless they are Edmonton, apparently) and this could lead to the inevitable contraction of teams particularly in non-traditional markets. This is opposite to the NHL goal of growing the game.

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    3. But that ties into the whole problem with Edmonton getting the first pick anyway. If the needy teams getting any talent would have worked beforehand, then Edmonton's amount of number one picks should make the Oilers a dynasty right now. Instead, they've done the opposite and become a bad team that stayed bad indefinitely, even though they should be a contender.

      The fact is: Bad teams WILL be bad, indefinitely, and there really is no one player who's an immediate quick fix. The only sport where a franchise player-level draft pick can change a team's fortunes immediately is basketball, where "the team with the best player on the court will probably win the game"- and even then, it's taken a few years of the team staying bad and aggregating more talent before they can break through to be a playoff team.

      It's not likely that any of the low-level teams, be they Edmonton, Toronto, Buffalo, or Arizona, will win the Stanley Cup next year with Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel on their roster. It's far more likely that- much like the Edmonton string of top picks, McDavid, or Eichel, would be forced into a position to carry a bad team and end up looking like a bust (more obviously with Buffalo/Arizona, who gutted themselves to get one of the two and ended up with a team where they'd be the only asset.)

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    4. I'm with Anon, I think the idea of giving everyone the same starting point to accrue points under the Gold system is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Do you really want a team like LA or Boston, who just narrowly missed out on the playoffs, to wind up with McDavid to bolster their rosters further? If LA got him, they might never lose again.

      You can make the argument that "bad teams will always be bad", but recent history does not bear that out. For every Florida or Edmonton, which have spent the last decade wandering the desert without ever looking more than mildly threatening, there's a Pittsburgh, LA, or Chicago. It's easy to forget now, but each of those teams were once considered laughingstocks every bit as pathetic as modern-day Edmonton, and they all rode out that misery to become powerhouses.

      While people, including myself, want the draft system to be updated to discourage tanking, let's not lose sight of the fact that the primary goal of the draft is to give weak teams an avenue to get better. We don't need to give the first overall pick to the teams that just narrowly missed the playoffs - they were in the playoff hunt right to the end, meaning there's no danger of them a) Tanking or b) Needing the huge boost to their roster a #1 pick can provide. The dilemma is how to distribute picks in a way that rewards teams that are bad but legitimately trying to get better, while discouraging demolition jobs like this year's Coyotes and Sabres.

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    5. Even then, though, the big problem is that there is no possible way to discourage tanking to get the best players in a system that rewards the worst teams with the best chance to get a franchise player, while also hindering the chances of a good team getting that player. Even your theory of "the bottom x teams swap draft picks" has a huge fatal flaw- even if the swap is basically randomized for which team gets which pick- once a team knows which team has "their" pick, that would make it better for the team to tank specifically (if Arizona made a series of trades to tank anyway, the only difference between the current format and this format would be that instead of trading to a number of teams to tank, if the bottom six teams had to swap picks, what stops a team like Arizona that was dedicated to tanking from saying "Toronto just got our pick in the draft- trade anyone on the team who can actually skate in a straight line to the Maple Leafs for a bag of pucks so that they get knocked out of the hunt for McDavid/Eichel", while also saying "We suddenly have Columbus's pick...block their number and don't take any calls from them until after the deadline so they can't do the same thing to us"?)

      The only system that doesn't reward tanking is "The Wheel", and even then you have the weakness of it putting every team in the same boat, so the Stanley Cup/President's Trophy winner could have the number one pick in the draft one year- plus the fact that if the draft class happens to be fairly weak the year a team's number comes up, the 30 year wait for their next number one pick would essentially murder hockey in that city. Even if you scrap the draft entirely, you're not going to discourage tanking (since a team that's decimated itself in a year when some franchise players are coming into the league would also be a franchise where present-day marquee free agents wouldn't want to sign unless they had no choice, which means that team would be loaded with guaranteed playing time for the incoming rookies and become a far more attractive destination.)

      The fact of the matter is that, in all likeliness, tanking is now a part of the sport. When a franchise-level prospect is coming into the league in any sport, teams are now savvy enough to know it's better to bottom out for the best chance at that player, and fans are now savvy enough to root for their team to lose in order to get the best chance at that player. No matter what method is used- it is time for sports fans to just accept that tanking is the new normal in the sport and it'll never change.

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    6. To your first point (I fleshed out the idea in the comments of the draft lotto power rankings, if you want to see the full text), the impetus for tanking largely disappears when you don't control your own pick. For instance, let's go with your example and say that Arizona and Toronto were forced to trade picks. If you're Arizona in that situation, why would you want to lose? All you're doing is solidifying Toronto's claim on McDavid (and weakening your own pick if Toronto is climbing the standings at your expense). No one wants to be the GM who handed the league's next generational player to someone else through their own inability to ice a decent roster. You could, as you suggest, try and torpedo Toronto's efforts (although you have it backwards - if Arizona holds Toronto's pick and vice versa, Arizona would want to try and make Toronto worse, not better, so that the pick they hold increases in value), but why would Toronto buy into that idea? If you're the Toronto GM and Arizona phones up and offers you a bunch of picks and prospects for your best players, why would you say yes when you know you've got a decent shot at winning McDavid if you can keep Arizona from climbing the standings? It would be like trading your star players to your biggest divisional rivals.

      Moreover, swapped picks means we won't have ridiculous situations like we did this year with Buffalo fans openly cheering against their own team during the Arizona games, because it's no longer a race to the bottom. If you're the Sabres in that situation, you know that the higher up the standings you can climb, the lower you push everyone else, including the team whose draft pick you owned. If Arizona and Buffalo hypothetically owned each other's picks during that game, those two late-season games could have been a "winner takes McDavid" situation - tell me that wouldn't have been exciting and given both fanbases something to cheer for in a season where those moments were in short supply.

      The Wheel does have it's drawbacks and you've hit upon the biggest of them - that not all drafts are created equal (you never know if you'll get a McDavid or a Yakupov) and that it isn't in any way weighted towards the weaker teams. That said, it would eliminate tanking while still ensuring that all teams get a steady trickle of fresh, young talent (keep in mind that even though you'd be waiting 30 years between first overall picks, you'd still get a top 6 pick every five years - even if it's not a generational superstar, picks that high are usually pretty solid blue chip prospects). I'd say it's still an improvement over our current situation, although I'm not convinced it's the best option.

      I also disagree that removing the lottery wouldn't address tanking either. If you're a rookie breaking into the league, you're probably looking at more things than "who would play me the most." You'd also be interested in what your chances are of being on a championship team, who is willing to pay more money for you, what the coaching and development is like on the team, how much media exposure you would get and how good the fanbase is, as well as non-hockey-related items like how nice the city is, whether you want to play for your hometown team, distance to friends and family, etc. I know that if I was the league's next generational star and I was given my pick of where I wanted to end up, my shortlist would not include Buffalo, Arizona (both complete wastelands at the moment that are years away from competing for anything) or Edmonton (terrible management and development). I'd be more inclined to go with a rising star like the Flames, an established contender like the Kings or Blackhawks, or an organization known for stability and longterm success like the Blues, Sharks, or Red Wings.

      That all being said, I think eliminating the lottery would cause more problems than it solves, so I'm not in favour of it.

      (continued)

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    7. (continued)

      With regards to tanking being part of the sport, I simply refuse to accept that - there are plenty of decent proposals out there to eliminate tanking. A team winning (or even just putting in an effort to win) is never something that should be discouraged or punished, even though in today's NHL it absolutely is. Look at the Blue Jackets, who went on a winning streak long after they'd been removed from the playoff conversation and did nothing but play themselves down the draft board. No fan should ever feel like cheering for their team to lose, for strategic reasons or otherwise.

      And this isn't just me stating a personal preference either - tanking is bad for the sport, because it leads to franchises like Buffalo and Arizona deliberately turning their teams into train wrecks, which lowers the quality of the on-ice product. DGB put it best: in today's NHL, no one finishes last except through deliberate tanking or managerial incompetence, and neither of those should be rewarded. If you want the game to continue to grow, you need as many meaningful, interesting games as possible. If I'm a fan of a bottom-feeder, I don't want to watch my team trade all our best and most marketable players away because the next McDavid is coming down the pipe. I don't want to watch one (or more) seasons of absolute misery as my team loses night after night because we're building for the future. But I also don't want to groan in agony as my team wins a bunch of meaningless, late-season games and torches their draft prospects in the process. Similarly, if I'm a star of a good or great team, I don't want to be bored watching my team completely steamroll one of these bottom-feeders whenever they're in town; I want to watch good, competitive, nail-biting hockey with teams trading chances at one another and the players on the ice fighting hard for the win.

      It serves no one's interest to encourage team owners and management to ice an inferior lineup. Every team should be encouraged to win every game every night and should be rewarded for doing so. Is that practically possible? Maybe not, but that's the ideal and I support any attempt to bring us closer to it.

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    8. In the end, I think that tanking has always been a part of sports, it is just highlighted this year because of Mcdavid. If anything, it is fortunate that Edmonton won over Buffalo/Arizona who were openly tanking. The only way I see to accomplish both the distribution of talent to those who need it and prevention of tanking would be to implement a review board to arbitrate accusations of tanking and penalize those teams through draft consequences.
      I also think people are up in arms because Edmonton won again (3rd time winning lottery, 4th first overall pick.) Mathematically speaking, even under the current format this is a statistical anomaly, as I believe it has been mentioned the odds of this streak of lottery luck are around 0.5%. It's hard to guard against extreme good fortune, although they could augment the system to prevent back to back firsts, etc.

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    9. Again, the first part does make some sense there. I did make a slip of the tongue, good catching it.

      As far as the other two- the biggest point with removing the draft- even if you have those theories for where a player would choose to play on the free market, playing time would still be a benefit. Putting every incoming rookie into the free agency pool leads to other issues, since they're also competing with established veteran players- and the rookies' may prefer to play for a top team instead of an also-ran, but so would everyone else in the league. From there, a rookie has the issue that just because "they" want to play for this team doesn't necessarily mean that that team wants them to play for them- they may not have a roster spot for that rookie instead...but there's this other team that's in a worse position but has 23 spots available. For the top teams that a free agent or a rookie would want to play for, the situation on the open market for, say, Jack Eichel would likely become less "Do you want to play for the Boston Bruins, or do you want to play for the Arizona Coyotes?", and more likely "do you want to play for the Arizona Coyotes, or play for the PROVIDENCE Bruins since the NHL team has no roster spots open with all the other players who signed?" Suddenly there, a lesser team that became a dumpster fire has an inherent advantage.

      Likewise, the Wheel being mentioned in the NBA has a bigger point, but the NHL has an even bigger issue beyond even the "top six pick every five years and a number one pick every 30"- keeping teams. The Wheel would end tanking forever, but at the cost of destroying the NHL as a whole. In exchange for tankings' end, suddenly the thought of a hope- keyword: HOPE- of a generational star in your year's draft is harder to deal with when arenas come to play. If you're an owner, you want a new stadium or you plan to relocate the team...but the fans know the team's a non-contender and their next number one pick is in 20 years, meaning they're putting their hopes on a player who hasn't even been conceived yet to lead them to the promised land: It's a lot easier for the fans to say "Nah, we're fine- relocate the team if that's what you're trying to do." It's even likelier that the owner then goes on to find that the only way they can relocate to a different arena is to go to a market so small and so rabid to have a pro franchise they'd be okay with the team being mediocre to sucking for 20 years just to have the NHL- leaving you with AHL or ECHL-level cities getting into the NHL.

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    10. Anon: Just because it's always been a part of sports doesn't mean it should be. After all, concussions were once "always" a part of football and hockey. And I think the reason people are so annoyed at Edmonton is because they don't NEED a new generational player. They have Hall and RNH and Eberle, all fantastic players that would be a perfectly workable core under a team with a competent management group. Contrast that with half the teams in the bottom ten and Edmonton comes out ahead.

      I find it hard to get upset at Arizona and Buffalo for deliberately tanking, especially with McDavid available as the prize, because they're simply playing the game by the rules as written. Hate the game, don't hate the player and all that. If you want someone to be annoyed at, be annoyed at the NHL for not recognizing this was going to happen and doing something to stop it.

      Thomas:

      I think we're going to have to agree to disagree regarding removing the draft. I think it's a bit of a moot point, since removing the lottery would introduce all sorts of headaches. We can debate the fine points of it but, simple fact of the matter is, some cities are just more attractive destinations than others. In a league so focused on parity, getting rid of the draft is a non-starter.

      I think the wheel has potential, but it needs a bit of tweaking. I could see introducing a provision that grants a team that finishes bottom four an option to switch first round draft picks with a randomly selected team that made the conference finals. That would give a glimmer of hope to the bottom dwellers, since it gives them a potential chance at a better pick if theirs is garbage that year, while at the same time making a provision for not giving an already-good team an excellent pick to go along with it. That does reintroduce a benefit to tanking but, ultimately, I think it's small enough not to matter. You wouldn't know who would make the finals in advance, meaning you'd be taking an awfully big gamble by throwing away a season in the hopes that you'll get to trade up to a good pick.

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  2. One problem with the gold system: it would disproportionately favor Eastern Conference teams due to the greater number of teams against an equal number of playoff spots. It would be expected for Eastern Conference teams to be eliminated earlier than Western Conference teams, particularly the first teams eliminated, allowing more chance to accrue points. Perhaps a slight change where accrual of post elimination points cannot begin until the final 10/15 games of the season. This would create more competition among the worst 3-4 teams while retaining the advantage versus playoff contenders eliminated in the final 5 or fewer games.

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