The NHL Draft Lottery Friday night was fairly straight-forward- Avoid anything other than a total FUBAR and the night is a success.
After all, the prize involved would gain some awful team the right to select winger Alexis Lafreniere and unless one of those teams entered into the swollen Covid-19 postseason would win this, the evening would go fine.
AND considering this is an NHL/Gary Bettman production, FUBAR is what happened as the "Team to be named later" won the top overall pick and a potential franchise player in Lafreniere, the worst team in hockey by far (Detroit) fell out of the top three, and now until that team is determined most of the draft movement comes to halt.
The Red Wings, who finished the season with twenty-three fewer points than the thirtieth place Ottawa Senators, will pick fourth behind the TTBNL, Los Angeles, and Ottawa's pick acquired from San Jose.
The New Jersey Devils moved from sixth to seventh in the first round after the lottery and will wait for whatever comes out of the potential finish of the season to see where and if they will own Vancouver's and/or Arizona's first-rounders in this draft.
The NHL will now hold another lottery after the first round of their playoffs with the eight teams that lost in the opening round all entered in a winner take all pull for the top pick.
Awful as Gary Bettman seemingly isn't pleased with Rob Manfred making a big move to challenge Bettman as the worst commissioner in sports title.
The one outcome that didn't work for anyone and that is exactly what the NHL received.
This easily could have avoided with one simple tweak and a small dose of common sense,
Since the league expanded the playoffs this season due to Covid-19 with eight extra teams making the postseason, the easy fix was this- Since those eight teams are being given the opportunity in the playoffs as a special bonus under the circumstances, the 2020 lottery would only consist of the seven teams not in the postseason.
That plan would have been the even-handed way to decide for the season and giving one set of teams a chance to play extra hockey and the others to battle in the lottery.
Typical Bettman.
I'm not crazy about lotteries and that's not sour grapes either.
The Cavaliers have won four NBA lotteries with Cleveland selecting LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Anthony Bennett, and Andrew Wiggins, and only in the LeBron James draft would Cleveland have picked first by the record.
The Devils have "Won" three times tabbing Adam Larsson when the lottery rules stated that the winner could jump no more than four spaces, so the Devils moved from eighth to fourth in that "win",
Nico Hischier, and Jack Hughes, so this isn't a "poor my team" complaint.
New Jersey would never have picked first in a draft order decided by lottery to this date.
It's hard to keep fans interested in rotten teams.
It's next to impossible to do so when the type of talent that can be franchise foundations are lost because of a process.
I will use both the Cavaliers and the Devils as examples.
Both teams have struggles signing elite free agents, Cleveland as a cold location and with lesser nightlife and New Jersey does have the nearby "Big Apple", but if that's important to a player, he's more likely to sign with the Rangers anyway.
If your team is bad, they will need to rebuild in the draft and for fans, the one thread to look forward when they are getting drilled every night is that the team will have a chance to draft players that can turn the tide.
Your reward for that is lottery placement with both leagues giving the worst teams lesser odds than they would deserve strictly by their record and having better odds of dropping spots than retaining your spot.
The Detroit Red Wings had a better chance of dropping three spots then they did than to stay in the top three and they had the worst record!
The usual retort is- "this keeps teams from tanking, they'll try to be competitive, and it won't hurt attendance/fan interest as much as tanking will".
A: I'm not sure this prevents tanking as much as the league would like to think.
B: General Rule: Bad teams are bad teams and the way they stay bad is trading assets for players to move a 25 win team to a 30 win team.
C: Few things deflate a fan base more than sitting through a 22-60 (NBA) season, thinking you are going to at least land a top two or three pick at worst, and then slide to "Browns Land" where you spend more money on a player than most of the leagues, yet has a high likelihood of not being an impact player.
How so? Look at the Cavaliers.
By record alone- Cleveland would have had the second pick in the draft, which clearly would have been
Ja Morant, the explosive point guard from Murray State.
By record, Memphis and New Orleans, who won the top pick and Zion Williamson, would have picked either sixth, seventh, or eighth as the two teams and Dallas all finished with the same record.
Morant is a foundational player and in his rookie season, averaged 17.6 points and 6.9 assists per game for a Memphis team that won 33 games in the season before his arrival and at the time of the COVID freeze, had won 32 games with 17 games to play with Morant as the only key player that the Grizzlies added from the previous season.
Cleveland fell to fifth and drafted
Darius Garland, also a point guard, from Vanderbilt.
Garland is averaging 12.3 points and 3.9 assists a night and the Cavaliers are wondering if Garland is part of their long-term program already.
To be fair, some of those questions are because the Cavaliers foolishly picked Garland one year after taking Collin Sexton in the first round, giving the Cavaliers two players that need the ball to be effective, are below-average defensively to be kind and are smaller guards, which is why I preferred
Jarrett Culver (taken sixth) to Garland as a positional fit.
Either way, Cleveland lost a player that you build franchises around and gained what could be a nice player, but is unlikely to be a franchise standout.
Tell me how excited Cleveland's fans were to suffer through a nineteen win season that deserved a franchise player and instead you were drafting at five?
Not going to make you run out and buy tickets, huh?
Garland, by the three various analytical standards (WinShares, VORP, and Real Plus-Minus), was named as the
worst player in the league by their measurements.
I'm not saying Garland's a bust, but he will have to raise his game a bit and I think that's more likely than not to occur, even if Garland doesn't turn out as a top-five selection level player.
The NBA lottery will take place on August 25th with the Cavaliers owning for the second consecutive year an equal chance at the top pick with two other teams at 14 percent and a 40 percent chance of winding up in the top three.
By record, Cleveland would pick either second or third as a tiebreaker would have to take place to decide the order as they tied with Minnesota for that slot.
The Devils finished with the league's third-worst record when they won the Jack Hughes lottery, so I don't feel that bad about the one, but they jumped from fifth to one in the 2017 draft that resulted in Nico Hischier, which is a little worse.
Hockey is a little different than basketball as one player can make a difference, but rarely does a draftee take a team to the playoffs even with the elite players such as Connor McDavid.
McDavid's as good as they come, but the Edmonton Oilers made the playoffs only once in his first four seasons.
In the end, the lottery is very similar to hockey's shootout- it's an exciting, but flawed and unfair way to decide who wins a game or how talent is allocated.
I think the lotteries should be weighted more towards the top three or four teams, but it could take a few years of craziness every year with lower teams odds gaining the top picks before any changes will be made.
Change only comes over time in these cases.
The NBA lottery will take place on August 25th and the draft has been moved to October 16th.
