Players and staff watch the second phase of the NHL draft lottery as they sit in the recreation area outside Rogers Place on August 10, 2020.Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images
In the last little while, it has become the done thing to bash on the NHL draft format.
Then on Monday, the New York Rangers won the right to pick first over all. The Rangers are not a bad team. They’re actually a pretty good team. They finished 18th out of 31 on points. Now they will pick Alexis Lafrenière and become an even better team. Apparently, this is a travesty.
Leading that charge on the draft broadcast was former Flames and Leafs general manager Brian Burke.
Playing his new TV role of the Ghost of Don Cherry Future, Burke fumed about a process that does not reliably reward the worst teams with the highest picks.
“It’s not fair. It’s not competitive. It’s not in tune with what the draft is designed to do. It’s gotta change.”
This is a perfectly reasonable perspective. But it’s a particular sort – that of an NHL general manager. I’d expect the people who run teams badly to love a system designed to throw them a life preserver.
Lost 50 games? Flipped a budding star for a dud? Got hosed in the trade market?
Great news, friend. Here’s the draft to rescue your whole operation. All you have to do is win this turn of the wheel. Then you get to abrogate all your responsibility to some poor 18-year-old kid.
There is a systemic flaw in the perfectly fair draft system Burke is envisioning. Granted, it does promote parity, but only in the long term. In the short term, it is a disaster for parity because teams are using it as encouragement to fail.
Nobody watches sports in the long term. They watch it in the present, when their team is a purpose-designed pile of hot garbage.
Ten years ago, the word tank was an epithet. Now it’s on the title page of every new GM’s presentation to the board. His first mission upon taking the job is doing it as poorly as possible in the hopes that he can be so awful the team might some day be good again. But, hey, no guarantees. This could take years and years (of paycheques).
This mindset is now accepted as rational in sports. Let’s try transposing it onto real life.
You work at a place that sells widgets. You and all the other salespeople operate at varying levels of competence in doing so. At the end of the year, one of you is much worse than the rest.
So the boss calls this bad salesperson in and says, “Tough year, Jones. Really feel for you. So you know we’re going to do? We’re going to give you the best new widget account, see if you can’t do better four or five years from now. That’s the fair, competitive and in-tune way to do things.”
The best widget salesperson will continue being so. She’s fine with where she’s at. But all the other mediocre widget salespeople will start getting notions. Why work hard to be semi-good when someone is encouraging you to be really bad?
The point here is that not that your widget company goes bankrupt (though it will). It’s that half the people you work with are losers.
The community of sports executives has split into two types. The first type wants to win regardless of what he is given to start out. Knowing it is unlikely that his win-oriented team is going to trip over a Connor McDavid or Auston Matthews, he is forced to hunt for value. In other words, to use his advanced hockey knowledge in order for his team to be good at hockey. He continues this year after year. If he makes a few bad moves on the value-hunting front, the team’s form dips and he is fired.
That’s the hard way to do sports, so that type is dying out.
The second type succumbs to the allure of losing. The hard part for him comes right at the beginning, when he publicly announces his lose-oriented tendencies. As long as people accept that – as they now enthusiastically do – everything else is cheesecake. He trades away all his good players in return for a bunch of shmucks and secondary picks. He drafts a million people on the theory that one or two of them are bound to be decent. He tries to lose with dignity, which ought to be impossible. Then he gets a primo pick and – voila – he’s a genius.
That sounds a lot easier, doesn’t it? Which is why so many ambitious young executives want to give it a go.
So now what you have is half a league. There’s the half that is trying, and the half that is trying to lose. Everyone in charge of every team makes roughly the same amount of money. Which job sounds better to you?
Burke’s argument also rests on a false premise – that sports is fair.
Sports is not fair. That’s why we call it “sports,” rather than “organized religion” or “socialism.”
Sports is meant to be cruel and capricious. Once you try to impose fairness on it, you take chaos out of the equation. Now we are all marching in lockstep into a world in which the Bruins and Penguins will inevitably become bad (because no good picks); and Senators and Red Wings will inevitably become powerhouses (because picks).
I prefer a world in which there is no escape hatch. You either build a decent team using your smarts, or you wallow in mediocrity forever. That the same ruthless logic applied to the players – be the best at your job or lose it – also applies to their bosses.
As for the draft, I would go entirely the opposite way. Make the draft lottery a 31-ball affair. The entire first round is the lottery. Anyone can end up picking anywhere. Then go back to picking in reverse order of finish in the second round. This would immediately end the tank era.
The question in this instance is not who benefits. Everyone benefits all the time in pro sports. Everyone is getting stupidly rich whether they win, lose or do the draft via a bunch of monkeys throwing darts at a spreadsheet. The question is, who suffers?
Owners suffer. A free-for-all draft breaks up their cozy “you win this year and I win the next” arrangement whereby everyone gets a turn holding a trophy. Now one or two of those owners is going to hold it a lot, and everyone else looks stupid. In the NHL, we used to call this the seventies.
GMs and other executives suffer. A few of them are going to have to start working for a living.
But hockey does not suffer. The New England Patriots have been the best team in football since Jesus was a cowboy, and the NFL has never been more successful.
Nor do fans suffer. How’s tank-to-win working out in Toronto and Edmonton? The new way of doing things is no more reliable than the old. Its only benefit is increased job security for a very few people.
In summation – bad for fat cats; at worst, a wash for everyone else.
That’s more along the lines of what I think of when I hear the word fair.
Cathal Kelly