How to Rectify the NHL Draft Lottery

The Trade Deadline day for 2015 has now passed. For Leafs fans, the next important milestone on the long road to the rebuild (The Rebuild Way?) is NHL Draft Lottery day. As is the current custom, NHL Draft Lottery day takes place on the day following the end of the regular season - this year that should be April 12, 2015. On that day, the main order of business for the NHL will be assigning, for the 14 teams who did not make the playoffs, their drafting order for the 2015 NHL Entry Draft.

Outside of front office personnel for the 14 non-playoff teams, most people don't pay much attention to the NHL Draft Lottery or its' outcome. This is understandable. In a typical draft year there are usually good players available but rarely are there great players available and rarer still are there "generational" players available.

For 2015, the consensus is that the NHL Entry Draft seems to be shaping up as one of those rare special years when a generational player is going to be available. In fact, it seems this year will be doubly special as it appears an extremely rare occurrence is going to take place - the availability of a 2nd generational player. This rarity has caused the stakes for this year's entry draft to shoot through the roof and with these sky high stakes will come a white hot scrutiny of the draft lottery process and especially the results.

Now, assuming all the conspiracy theorists, who think the winner of the 1^st overall draft pick has already been determined, are incorrect, what exactly will happen on April 12th? On that day the NHL, knowing which 14 teams did not make the playoffs, will assign a draft position and that draft position’s associated percentage odds of securing the 1st overall draft pick to each of those 14 teams.

For 2015, here’s how the odds for securing the 1^st draft pick break down:

Finish	Odds
30th	20.0%
29th	13.5%
28th	11.5%
27th	9.5%
26th	8.5%
25th	7.5%
24th	6.5%
23rd	6.0%
22nd	5.0%
21st	3.5%
20th	3.0%
19th	2.5%
18th	2.0%
17th	1.0%

Table 1.

For example, if the season had ended on March 10th, the order of finish from 30th to 17th and therefore the percentage odds assigned to each team to secure the 1st overall draft pick would have been:

Finish	Team	Odds
17th	Los Angeles	1.0%
18th	San Jose	2.0%
19th	Florida	2.5%
20th	Colorado	3.0%
21st	Ottawa	3.5%
22nd	Dallas	5.0%
23rd	Philadelphia	6.0%
24th	New Jersey	6.5%
25th	Columbus	7.5%
26th	Carolina	8.5%
27th	Toronto	9.5%
28th	Arizona	11.5%
29th	Edmonton	13.5%
30th	Buffalo	20.0%

Table 2.

A key point concerning the 2015 NHL Draft Lottery needs to be clarified:

The 30^th place team is guaranteed, at worst, the 2^nd overall pick!

As can be seen from Table 2 above, by having a plan and very obviously sticking to it, Buffalo would have guaranteed themselves one of the two generational players available in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft.

Is this an example of Buffalo being handsomely rewarded for what the NHL has previously publicly stated it considers bad behaviour? i.e ”tanking”.

Not to be seen as condoning “tanking”, the NHL will attempt to discourage such bad behaviour, starting with the 2016 Draft Lottery. In 2016 the NHL will remove from the team finishing in 30th place the guarantee, at worst, of receiving the 2nd overall draft pick. Instead the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd overall draft picks will ALL be assigned via the lottery system. In this new system, the team finishing in 30th place could, in fact, fall all the way from the 1st overall draft pick to the 4th overall draft pick. Will this be enough to discourage the bad behaviour?

Whether the revised rules for the 2016 NHL Draft Lottery will discourage “tanking” or not, the NHL should be applauded for their attempts to fix the perceived flaws in the current NHL Draft Lottery by changing the rules to discourage this bad behaviour.

Unfortunately, whether these rule changes will actually have the desired effect won’t be determined until the next generational player becomes draft eligible. But, as long as the team finishing in 30^th place still has substantially better odds than the other 13 non-playoff teams it seems the answer is pretty clear.

While everyone seems most concerned with the obvious “tanking” behaviour that some teams are engaged in, what is being ignored from Table 2 above is the very real possibility that one of the really good teams on that list of 14 non-playoff teams, for example Los Angeles, could win the 1st overall pick in the 2015 NHL Draft Lottery. If this was to happen it is almost guaranteed that the 29 other teams would be at the head of a rather large angry mob marching on NHL headquarters in New York.

Now imagine if the unthinkable was to happen in the 2016 Draft Lottery and the teams finishing 17th, 18th, and 19th overall were to secure some combination of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd overall draft picks?

In my opinion, only a bold change can address what most other teams and fans outside of the “lucky 3” cities would describe as the extreme injustices discussed in the two previous paragraphs.

My Radical Suggestion

Re-introduce the concept of protected drafting territories similar to what the NHL operated under in the mid-sixties before expansion took the league from 6 to 12 teams.

This idea (The Protected Drafting Territory Rule) would allow each NHL team to select 1 player per year from within their assigned protected drafting territory. This selection would not count as one of their picks in the NHL Entry Draft.

The NHL, its constitute teams, the affected players, and the local communities around each NHL team would all benefit from the Protected Drafting Territory Rule (P.D.T.R.) in the following ways:

1. It would encourage each NHL team to help establish (if not already in place) and continue to nurture hockey in their local market. By helping to establish and nurture amateur hockey in their nearby communities, each team would help grow their local fan base.

2. Players, who most likely would have grown up fans of their local NHL team, would know in the year they became eligible for the NHL Entry Draft that they would get a chance to play for their local team if they were the player designated under the P.D.T.R.

3. Local communities around NHL teams might be encouraged to more strongly support their local team if they knew that players they had watched develop throughout their local amateur hockey leagues would be given a chance to play for their local team. This localization of a fan base has been proven many times over at various levels of football, basketball and baseball – particularly in the U.S.

4. By growing the game at the grass roots level, the NHL would see an increase in revenues and therefore franchise values.

5. As any potential generational players might be unavailable to the 29 other teams because of the P.D.T.R. it would therefore discourage the bad behaviour of "tanking".

The obvious question concerning the P.D.T.R. is how viable is it.

As can be seen from the locations of the current NHL teams on the map below, most of the teams are sufficiently spread out geographically so as to allow them to have a fairly large Protected Drafting Territory (P.D.T.).

 Map courtesy of NHL.com

Working from the West to East Coasts, here is a suggestion for each team’s P.D.T.:

  1.  Vancouver   – province of British Columbia

 2.  San Jose    - state of California N. of San Jose

 3.  Los Angeles - state of California S. of L.A. to Anaheim

 4.  Anaheim     - state of California S. of Anaheim

 5.  Calgary     - province of Alberta S. of Calgary

 6.  Edmonton    - province of Alberta N. of Edmonton

 7.  Arizona     - state of Arizona

 8.  Colorado    - state of Colorado

 9.  Dallas      - state of Texas

10. Winnipeg    - province of Manitoba

11. Minnesota   - state of Minnesota

12. St. Louis   - state of Missouri

13. Chicago     - state of Illinois

14. Nashville   - state of Tennessee

15. Detroit     - state of Michigan

16. Columbus    - state of Ohio

17. Tampa       - state of Florida N. of Tampa

18. Pittsburgh  - state of Pennsylvania E. to ½ distance to Philly

19. Florida     - state of Florida S. of Sunrise

20. Toronto     - province of Ontario E. to ½ distance to Ottawa

21. Buffalo     - state of New York E. to Albany

22. Carolina    - State of North Carolina

23. Washington  - states of Maryland & Virginia

24. Ottawa      - province of Ontario W. to ½ distance to Toronto

25. Philly      - state of Pennsylvania W. to ½ distance to Pitt.

26. Montreal    - province of Quebec

27. New Jersey  - state of New Jersey

28. Rangers     - state of New York N. to Albany

29. Islanders   - state of New York – Long Island

30. Boston      - state of Massachusetts

As can be seen from the above chart, there are some potential areas of overlap. But with the expectation that the above serves only as a starting point, it would be fairly easy to hammer out the details as to the exact territories for each of the 30 teams.

In fact, a first modification of the above could see each team be granted a 25 mile radius around their arena and where this did not make sense from a geographical point of view (i.e. oceans and/or lakes), the distance in the opposite direction from the barrier could be doubled to 50 miles.

Now I know my radical suggestion will be deemed impractical. But is it really? Wouldn’t it go a LONG way towards helping solidify the game at the grass roots level all over the NHL but particularly so in some of the more challenging markets in the U.S.

In the near future, I’ll be posting follow up articles to this one where I’ll use the P.D.T.R. to create possible alternate drafts from the past few years. How different would each team, especially the Leafs, look?