Avalanche Roundtable: Broken lottery system?

The NHL held Phase One of the NHL Draft lottery last Friday and the results were predictably hilarious as last-place Detroit followed in Colorado’s footsteps and tumbled all the way down from the first pick to the fourth pick.

The real surprise of the event, however, was not Los Angeles getting the second pick or Ottawa landing at pick three, it was one of the team’s playing in the Qualifying Round landing the first overall selection.

That means one of the eight teams that will have a chance to compete for the Stanley Cup when hockey returns at the end of next month (you know, assuming good health and all) will lose its best-of-five series and then go into the lottery for the opportunity to select first overall and drastically change the course of their franchise.

Naturally, this leads to today’s topic: The lottery was about not rewarding teams for tanking after Arizona and Buffalo shamelessly refused to ice competitive rosters in search of Connor McDavid’s services. Just twice in the last ten years, the team that has finished last in the standings has won the lottery. But with the madness of last week, has the lottery process gone too far?

AJ: I don’t think what happened last week is some miscarriage of justice but I definitely think the odds have swung a little too far in the wrong direction. I’m all for dissuading tanking but sometimes teams just have a bad year (San Jose?) and getting rocked in the lotto every year doesn’t solve any problems. If anything, we’re seeing the mayhem scenario play out every year. A team from outside the bottom 10 has jumped into the top three the last four years. That’s too much chaos. Teams that were just not quite good enough don’t need to be involved in the lottery.

In the end, dissuading teams from tanking is good for the sport. This chaos in the lottery every year makes for 30 minutes of interesting television but I’m not sure it’s actually healthy for the game overall. I’d like to see some limits imposed on how many times a team can win first overall to avoid the Edmonton/New Jersey silliness and change up the odds of the last place team finishing fourth. They can weight it so winning first overall is still unlikely but the last-place team having a greater than 50% chance to finish fourth is just too much. It should’ve been addressed after it happened to Colorado once but seeing it keep it happening now says let’s tweak this a little bit.

Evan: To me, the results this year are not that different from what we’ve seen in the last few years. The only difference is this crazy situation is giving the opportunity to a team that is going to continue playing because the league needed 24 teams in this potential play-in round, I guess.

For me, I would weigh the odds higher for the bottom teams than what they have now. I get that it’s Detroit, so it’s fun to laugh at the situation, but the bottom team getting jumped by three teams doesn’t make sense to me. At the same time, they do need to set a rule where you can only win the lottery once every four years. Bad teams should get something, but it cannot continue to happen over and over again (New Jersey).

Rudo: I may be the voice of dissension here but I have no problem with tanking and rewarding it. Being a bottom feeder is part of the natural cycle of a sports team in a league where you can’t buy your way to success every year. If you are the worst team in the league you should get the best pick, end of story.

It’s a pick your poison situation, the evil of tanking vs the evil of a lottery. The problem for me is two-fold: One, a lottery hasn’t fully prevented tanking, mitigate it sure, but for a shot at a generational type player teams are still willing to bottom out. Two, we have seen two of the worst post-lockout seasons in modern NHL history under the current lottery system. Neither of those teams were tanking and neither of those teams ended up with a top-three pick. The Avs fluking their way into Cale Makar is no excuse for a broken system that punishes teams for being bad unintentionally.