Avalanche Roundtable: NHL's rush to return

The NHL continues to make it clear they would like to hold the NHL Draft in early June before the season resumes. This creates a handful of complications and would need a significant amount of tweaking in order to get it accomplished but ultimately they can hold the draft whenever they want.

Today’s topic: How do you feel about the NHL contemplating holding the draft in early June and what changes would you make to the system in order to accommodate a draft held before the end of the season?

AJ: I hate it. It feels like the people in the NHL league office watched the NFL Draft and thought “Man, so many people care about this because no sports!” and the reality is the NFL Draft is a massive event regardless of what’s going on in the world. The idea the NHL will be capitalizing on some huge market of people dying to watch anything is garbage. A bunch of non-hockey fans aren’t going to tune into the NHL draft just to watch a bunch of teenagers who won’t be in the league for several more years get selected.

That makes the concept of them forcing it in early June before games come back and mostly viewing it as a nuisance to get out of the way now instead of later as troublesome. Pick conditions are a problem that need answering but the league also has to create a different lottery system or go back to an old one. They changed the old system for a reason. Watching teams that purposely didn’t try to ice competitive rosters get free passes because of a pandemic has to be frustrating to an organization like Colorado who watched a horror show worst-case scenario play out twice in a three-year span in the lotto. NOW the league feels like just handing over the top picks to the worst teams isn’t a problem? It’s either an issue or it isn’t and the moving of the goalposts would be a lot more frustrating had the Avs not gotten very lucky along the way with their picks being Cale Makar and Bowen Byram. I’ve always been against poor reasoning and the NHL is full of it in this push to return.

Evan: If they are dead set on the draft happening in early June, then that tells me they are dead set on this season returning in one shape or another. If they are truly going to hold the draft, then I think they should decide who is in the playoffs and who is out, and then from there, just go with the regular lottery format that they have been using the last handful of years.

I don’t agree with jamming the draft into early June, and I certainly don’t think the NHL is going to get the ratings they seem to believe they will, but seeing as how the Avs have lost two lotteries in the last five years, these other teams should have to deal with the same lottery process. There’s no reason to hold onto the idea that you can fit in some regular season games before any playoffs were to occur, so just lock it in and go from there.

Rudo: As someone who loves the draft and would enjoy the hockey-related content, holding the draft in early June is nonsense. As Evan said they seem extremely focused on bringing hockey back in some form so why ruin the system in place, holding the draft after whatever form of playoffs they ultimately have. No matter what rules they put in place and what allowances they give teams are going to come out of this situation feeling jobbed. The worst offender being all of the picks traded with playoff relevant conditions. A scenario where the playoffs never happen is one thing, playoff conditions were not met. A situation where the draft happens and then after the fact playoff conditions can be met is madness.

While rumors have been flying about potential answers to this and other questions such as controlling the lottery odds and how far teams can move up nothing is yet set in stone and “early June” is less than a month away. When you look at it in context it just feels like an unnecessary desperation play to put hockey content out there. To answer the question I don’t think the NHL should even consider holding the draft before the end of the season, and the wide-sweeping changes necessary will be confusing and problematic.