Mediocrity shouldn’t be rewarded, they say. But without rewards, how can we put an end to mediocrity? Is all mediocrity planned? Is it somehow part of the natural cycle of a sports league? Is mediocrity welcome at the heart of ideal parity?
These are all questions I asked myself after reading the article Finissons-en avec la médiocre loterie de la LNH, by Martin Leclerc, for Radio-Canada .
At the end of an essay in which Leclerc denounces a lottery that rewards “planned mediocrity”, he proposes the “wheel” concept: staggered over 32 years, the “wheel” offers a 1-32 choice to all teams, alternating equally according to a predetermined cycle that allows for “planned” construction.
Questions are being raised, however, about what would be a fairly drastic change in the North American sporting ecosystem.
Rebuilding 10 years later
“The leaders of these clubs hope to accumulate enough talent to eventually build a champion team. However, there are very few chosen ones among those who venture down this path. Let’s talk again in 10 years, at the same time and in the same place, and count up all the cups that the Sharks, Blackhawks, Ducks, Blue Jackets, Tricolore and former Coyotes will have won,” says Martin Leclerc.
That’s a pretty important observation, considering that a series of high picks is not synonymous with a champion team.
So let’s take a look 10 years ago, in 2014, and see where we stand a decade later.
There have been failures.
The Blue Jackets just made the playoffs and finally seem to be making it after nine straight top-10 picks, followed by Ryan Johansen (4th in 2010) and Ryan Murray (2nd in 2012).
They’ll make the playoffs in four consecutive seasons, winning a memorable round against the Lightning, before falling apart and starting all over again.
The Islanders have drafted in the top-10 seven times in nine years, including John Tavares at #1 in 2009.
They would reach the Eastern Finals twice, but without their captain, helped by Mathew Barzal drafted 15th the following year, but mostly as anunderdog defensive team that subsequently aspired to nothing more.
The Sabres just fielded an obnoxious lineup that won just 21 games in 2013-2014, and would do worse the following year to draft Jack Eichel.
Despite four lottery picks prior to 2014 and eight to follow, the Sabres have yet to make the playoffs, and are slow to do so despite a more-than-interesting core. Their “planned mediocrity” and exaggeration, I might add, has had significant damage on the organization’s competitiveness and credibility.
From 2004 to 2017, the Coyotes drafted in the top-15 ten times and in the top-8 seven times. Yet the team never had any notable success, so much so that the market lost its club – now called the Utah Hockey Team.
Good teams have also emerged from this process. It has to be said, though, in context.
The Oilers just drafted Leon Draisaitl, Darnell Nurse, Nail Yakupov, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Taylor Hall.
10 years later, the team has only made it past the second round once.
And while they may end up hoisting the trophy, it’s worth noting that Jordan Eberle, the first top-10 pick of this rebuild, was drafted 16 years ago and the Oilers’ mediocrity was, for a long time, unresolved, before Connor McDavid, the best player of his generation, saved the day somewhat in 2015.
Two years after Morgan Rielly was selected fifth overall, the Maple Leaf s selected William Nylander eighth overall and set about destroying their club to select Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews.
And while they may one day emerge from their torpor, the Toronto outfit remains a laughingstock to this day, for whom the core has only won one series in far too many years. It could be said that the mediocrity orchestrated by a line-up almost certain to finish last in the NHL has severely damaged the organization’s culture.
The Panthers have just completed a sequence of three top-3 picks in four years with Aaron Ekblad, 1st, Aleksander Barkov, 2nd, and Jonathan Huberdeau, 3rd.
The club enjoyed a magical spring 2023 all the way to the Stanley Cup Final. Yet, despite the organization’s problems attracting spectators, the Panthers weren’t deliberately bad and were in dire need of talent on the ice.
A similar example occurred with the Hurricanes. In the midst of a three-year sequence with two #5 and one #7 pick, between Jeff Skinner (2010) and Andrei Svechnikov (2018), the Canes are building a good club.
Its success in recent years is striking, but it’s hard to suggest that the team has willingly stagnated in the shallows. And without the development of this exciting team, the amphitheatre would most likely not be full and rumours of relocation might never have stopped – as they have in Florida.
Of all the teams that often drafted in the top-10 10 years ago, there have already been some successes.
Never forget, however, that between the selections of Matt Duchene in 2009, Gabriel Landeskog in 2011, Nathan MacKinnon in 2013 and Cale Makar in 2017, theAvalanche have been accidentally bad and inconsistent. And don’t forget that the Stanley Cup won 11 years after Victor Hedman and Steven Stamkos were selected by the Lightning was mostly marked by good draft picks and an outstanding development team.
The nuance is awfully important. There are a few in the last few lines.
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Neither black nor white
I notice two nuances at two different levels.
Firstly, there’s a difference between an organization that deliberately demolishes its line-up and a club that is simply slow to blossom or succeed.
Secondly, it’s clear that several top-five picks don’t guarantee anything – but that a single first-round pick will normally ensure a competitive team.
The problem, then, is rewarding a team that makes its club dynamic with a first overall pick.
Because let’s be clear:
I don’t have a problem with the Coyotes, who are trying to dig themselves out of the hole, to no avail, and who finish the season with 36 wins and 77 points… But I do have a problem with the Sharks, who got rid of anything worthwhile to rack up 19 wins and 47 points.
Reaching the end of a cycle naturally happens. Winning less than 25% of your games doesn’t just happen.
To solve this problem, you don’t have to say goodbye to the lottery system. We simply need to encourage a system that discourages teams from destroying their roster in order to get a first overall pick.
The NBA example
It’s a cliché, and you can roll your eyes, but it’s true. The NHL normally likes to follow the NBA’s lead.
You need look no further than May 12 to find an example of a lottery that works in North American professional sports.
For 2019, the NBA has decided to increase the number of draft picks in its lottery from three to four.
The result?
The Detroit Pistons, the worst team on the circuit, slipped from 1st to 5th in the 2024 draft… Twice in a row!
Instead, it was the Atlanta Hawks, who had only a 3% chance of being selected first, who got it.
Last year, France’s Victor Wembanyama, arguably the best rookie season in NBA history, was the proverbial draft lottery prize. Being historically bad has instead earned the Pistons… Ausar Thompson.
The Pistons, weak from their record 28-game losing streak, entered the lottery with a 14% chance of drafting first – a probability tied with the next-to-last-ranked team, the Wizards.
More importantly, only 0.7% ahead of the 28th-place team, the Hornets, and 0.8% ahead of the 27th-place team, the Trail Blazers.
Winning 17% or 26% of your games makes virtually no difference in the NBA. The Pistons had a nearly 50% chance of picking 5th, and that’s what happened.
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The NHL counter-example
What if the Blackhawks, instead of acquiring the NHL’s Wembanyamesque equivalent, Connor Bedard, had ended up with… David Reinbacher?
It’s hard to understand why the NHL moved in the opposite direction.
The probability of the worst team on the shield was 25%, before 2015, when it was reduced to 20%, then to 18% with the arrival of Vegas, and to 16.6% in 2021. We seemed to be heading in the right direction, and the surprises were multiplying.
Then, the very next year, the figure became higher than that of 2014, at 25.5%.
Finishing last in the NHL means you get the first overall pick more than once in four years, and j-a-m-a-i-s worse than third.
There’s a problem with the lottery, and it’s not that it exists.
It’s that the league allows it to be an incentive to be not just mediocre, but cruelly bad – against all odds, the worst team in the league.
The dangers of the “wheel
Now that we’ve established what’s up with the current lottery, let’s get back to the “wheel”.
Let’s start with what seems to me to be the most obvious problem with this system, which is that it inevitably falls apart as soon as there’s an expansion. In all likelihood, there is no solution other than redoing the entire order. The planning aspect takes a back seat, let’s say.
The “wheel” also opens the door to anomalies.
What happens when a club’s best players age, the team reaches the end of a cycle, but doesn’t benefit from several consecutive good picks to “kickstart” the franchise?
What happens if Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kristopher Letang retire in 2025, but the system in place gives them access to picks 30, 15, 18, 6, 27, and 10 over the next six years?
What happens when an unintentionally mediocre team can no longer attract free agents to its market, trade currencies are low and it takes 3 years to draft an impact player-who may himself take a few years to become a tangible asset?
What happens if the Winnipeg Jets lose their good players, the seats empty, no impact player wants to move to Manitoba, and the sequence of picks offered to them consists of a series of selections at ranks 31, 14, 19, 7, 26, 11, and 22?
What happens when an already highly competitive team is rewarded with a generational player?
What happens if the young Buffalo Sabres team emerges, makes it to the Eastern Finals in 2025 and wins the Stanley Cup in 2026, only to be rewarded with Gavin McKenna in that same draft?
There’s reason to fear that it would be a long time before the balance was restored – or, I imagine, established.
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A difficult-to-simulate cycle
The idea of the “wheel” revolves around the idea that it is possible to plan a team’s competitive cycle.
The draft lottery provides the necessary fluidity around this process, but above all it ensures that the less well-off teams are pushed upwards, while the powers-that-be don’t get a free ride.
This season, there was only a 10-point difference between the last playoff spot and the 25th-place team with the eighth overall pick.
The NHL isn’t made up of 18 competitive teams and 14 “tanking” teams ,and the playoff race wasn’t over at the start of February. On February 1, eleven teams were still seven points or less out of the playoffs, and six of them only three points out of 16th place.
There may be a problem at the bottom of the National Hockey League, but the solution is not the “wheel”, in my opinion.
Unanswered questions
Let me ask a few rhetorical questions.
Is a professional circuit model in which there is almost absolute parity and all teams aspire to the playoffs feasible?
What would happen to a league where 32 teams aspired to top honors, but only half of them made the playoffs?
What format would suit such a vision?
Would we miss the dynasties in a league where talent was even more diluted across more than 30 teams?
It’s too fictitious to answer yet.
Perhaps we could simply start by lowering the probabilities of the worst teams, reducing the last-place incentive and drawing more than two names into the abacus?
The lottery is broken, but not irreparable.