GDT: 2018 Trade Deadline Thread

[Oddbob]

Gross. Any system that rewards teams for being average is a lousy way to entertain people. If the NHL adopted something this extreme, I'd completely walk away for good.

Right now, they reward the teams that suck and play boring hockey, a la us and the yearly teams Edmonton, Arizona and Buffalo. That is more gross! Look how many good young players get wasted in Arizona every year, because they suck like 80% of their existence. 15 Lottery Balls, with no extra balls for any team, would be a great idea. That would also as Original Six pointed out give the NHL an exciting near the draft night, where the missing playoff teams all have an equal shot at the draft, as well as finding out where your team landed. I think that would be awesome, rather than the oh I hopt we lose mentality when your team is 3 or 4 pts out of a playoff. 10 years ago, we never heard that, it was always I hope our team can do well down the stretch and make it in. Now fans would rather lose and hope they get a lucky pick that will help them win in 5-10 years from now.

Also, to the people who keep complaining about our situation. Aren't we doing what we need to for the past 2 seasons, being bad and near the bottom, and shipping out people we won't have or need in 4+ years? We are 8th worst right now, and only 4-6 pts from being bottom 3, that is only 3 wins worth of pts at most, and we could be parked even lower. Heck, even if we finish with the 8th Overall Pick, that is still awesome, especially this year, seeing as it is a strong draft up front. The Top 10-15 teams, all seem like they will get a decent player out of the mix, which is not always the case, and we also have a second first, plus a number of other picks in the top 3. Holland has done what was needed the past 2 seasons, like it or not! He may be saying contradictory things about making playoffs, (PR drivel is all it is) but you all know, if he legit thought we were making the playoffs or good enough to make the playoffs, there is absolutely no way he trades Tatar.

If anything, he trades AA for an older, better D, or he trades a Hronek or someone else to improve the roster, however he didn't. I maintain that Holland is doing what the Illitch Family dictates just as he and any other GM will do. We need a new GM to change the voice, so to speak, in my opinion, but don't mistake the fact that the new GM will also have to follow whatever the marching orders are.

Look at Dorion: What GM would want to trade Karlsson? Probably None! (Melnyk says no to money for anyone)
Look at Tallon: Owners say shed salary, so guess what, bye bye salary
Look at Doug McLean (Old Panther/Jackets GM): He used to have to trade good roster players for 3rd and lower drafts picks, because the Jackets owners wanted to save $800,000, eventhough it made his team a lot worse.

 

[Flowah]

I can't help but feel all this "all out of playoff teams should have the same odds!!!!" talk is just sour grapes over the fact that we probably won't win the lottery.

Yes, the worst teams deserve more help. Just like the worst student in class needs more attention from the teacher or the sickest patient gets the doctors first. That's how it works and that's fine.

Anything else increases the odds that a team that's just actually bad stays bad. That's not healthy for the game or the league. You can talk all you want about scouts but the fact is that elite players outside the top5 are incredibly rare. Yes they exist. Yes there's, in an absolute sense, a lot of them around the league. But that's because you're not doing the math right. You're looking at how many players are found in ~200 picks in the entire rest of the draft versus the top5. Yes of course out of 200 picks a year there will be some top talent that slipped through the cracks. But it's a tiny percentage change that speaks to randomness and luck, not repeatable scouting skill.

 

[Lil Sebastian Cossa]

Gross. Any system that rewards teams for being average is a lousy way to entertain people. If the NHL adopted something this extreme, I'd completely walk away for good.

But a system that rewards teams for being absolutely putrid is much better for entertainment.

It should not reward you for being average or for being terrible. The goal is that even the team at the bottom of the league is giving an honest effort in every game. You know, the "any given Sunday" type mentality where any team can theoretically win any game.

I mean, look at college football. Games against 1-AA/FCS schools are glorified scrimmages that they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their dicks stomped in. For fans of a big time school, like Alabama when they play Troy or Michigan plays Delaware State... those games are ones that relatively nobody goes to see.

There is no fun in watching a pre-determined result in a professional sport unless said sport is predicated on that (pro wrestling is fun, but everyone goes in knowing that that is fake.) The worst possible thing for league growth and sustainability is to allow teams to toss away seasons before they even start. Like, who's going to watch the Tigers this year? They're gonna be godawful and everyone knows it.

 

[Lil Sebastian Cossa]

I can't help but feel all this "all out of playoff teams should have the same odds!!!!" talk is just sour grapes over the fact that we probably won't win the lottery.

Yes, the worst teams deserve more help. Just like the worst student in class needs more attention from the teacher or the sickest patient gets the doctors first. That's how it works and that's fine.

Anything else increases the odds that a team that's just actually bad stays bad. That's not healthy for the game or the league. You can talk all you want about scouts but the fact is that elite players outside the top5 are incredibly rare. Yes they exist. Yes there's, in an absolute sense, a lot of them around the league. But that's because you're not doing the math right. You're looking at how many players are found in ~200 picks in the entire rest of the draft versus the top5. Yes of course out of 200 picks a year there will be some top talent that slipped through the cracks. But it's a tiny percentage change that speaks to randomness and luck, not repeatable scouting skill.

No... what's not healthy for the league is having several teams just piss away season after season by chasing a top pick. The issue with tanking is that it's essentially a student in class that's realistically a C student actively ****ing up every test because he wants to get the bonkers hot tutor to help him out. That the sickest patient is actively trying to contaminate his wounds or exacerbate his symptoms to jump to the front of the line.

It WAS fine when there were very rare instances of it. It was fine when you weren't having franchises come out and actually say that they're doing it (76ers, Astros, Spurs, Sabres, etc) When leagues weren't fining owners for saying it. Tanking has become far too prevalent in the sports lexicon for it to be ignored now. Especially in basketball and hockey where there is such a high correlation between top 5 picks and best players in the league and there is such a premium on having those elite players during their cheap years of team control under the cap.

 

[Winger98]

Overachieving in the playoffs is always a positive and underachieving is always a negative. The exact opposite is true for teams that finish outside the playoffs. The lottery tries to counter that a bit, but it's still largely the case.

Our definitions of tanking will probably differ, so I'll leave that one alone.

I guess I have an issue with the terms "deserve" and "undeserved".

Fair enough. I should have been clearer but with the deserve/undeserved thing started with the wings, and it was about Holland picking a direction and taking the repercussions of that decision. I look at the Wings and I see Holland making a lot of decisions to put together an, at best, average team and he deserves average results for that. But if we luck out and win the draft lotto, suddenly it looks genius when it was really just insanely dumb luck. Not quite as insane as Pittsburgh winning the Crosby lotto, but definitely not something that Holland was in any way playing for, ya know?

At the same time, as a Wings fan, I'd take it.

I'm guessing if you want Edmonton to get it over Detroit, you're not a Wings fan, if so fair enough.

I understand why people are upset with Holland, you have a system setup where two types of teams are rewarded...the elite (with cups) and the bad (with lottery picks) and with that being reality, he is keeping his team right in the middle (ie. mediocrity). I 100% understand the frustration from fans of him/ownership doing this.

I AM NOT saying that given the system you have, tanking to a degree is stupid. What I am saying is not some attempt to defend Holland or ownership, its not. What I am saying, is you should have a system in place that rewards competition, not tanking.

Personally I am a fan or re-building, not tanking. But I dont want to get into that.

Part of competition is putting yourself into position to load up on the players you need to compete, though. I just don't think tanking is really that much of a thing. Someone mentioned Toronto, but their point % (one fewer wins but one more point) was higher the year they drafted Matthews than it was the year before that. I think there are just some really lousy teams, and their inability to climb out of their hole isn't on purpose. It's just a combination of it being really hard building a good team and their being lousy franchises.

And I should have been more specific. I want Edmonton to win it if we don't. But what I really want is just the worse teams to draft higher.

 

[ShelbyZ]

Buffalo tanking was one of the few actual tanks I could remember, though. I think Pittsburgh tanked hard for Mario. Were there shenanigans the year Lindros was drafted?

IIRC, the Nordiques were pretty bad already, having chosen #1OA the two drafts prior... Their team was basically 21 and 20 YO Sakic and Sundin surrounded by a rotating cast of other barely 20YO rookies and young guys, a few middling tweeners, an almost 40 Guy LaFleur and .88 goaltending.

The one you're forgetting is Ottawa tanking hard in their inaugural post expansion season to get Alexandre Daigle.

That's probably the most significant example, because it's what pretty much inspired the league to introduce the lottery. And the giant contract he signed before he even stepped on NHL ice (and the issues it eventually caused when he was soundly outperformed by Yashin) helped bring about the limits put on ELCs.

The tank for Daigle is probably the best evidence AGAINST tanking.

 

[Frk It]

Fair enough. I should have been clearer but with the deserve/undeserved thing started with the wings, and it was about Holland picking a direction and taking the repercussions of that decision. I look at the Wings and I see Holland making a lot of decisions to put together an, at best, average team and he deserves average results for that. But if we luck out and win the draft lotto, suddenly it looks genius when it was really just insanely dumb luck. Not quite as insane as Pittsburgh winning the Crosby lotto, but definitely not something that Holland was in any way playing for, ya know?

Yeah, this is how I look at it. And my perception of Holland's comments has been there is even a level of hubris there, where he thinks he won't have to resort to what all of the other teams have had to do to re-build a team. Almost as if he is "above" that.

That said, everyone is more reliant on luck than they were before. As we know, the best you can possibly do is a 48% chance at a top 3 pick. Would Holland have the same outlook if the lottery remained how it was? Maybe not, hard to say.

 

[jkutswings]

No... what's not healthy for the league is having several teams just piss away season after season by chasing a top pick. The issue with tanking is that it's essentially a student in class that's realistically a C student actively ****ing up every test because he wants to get the bonkers hot tutor to help him out. That the sickest patient is actively trying to contaminate his wounds or exacerbate his symptoms to jump to the front of the line.

It WAS fine when there were very rare instances of it. It was fine when you weren't having franchises come out and actually say that they're doing it (76ers, Astros, Spurs, Sabres, etc) When leagues weren't fining owners for saying it. Tanking has become far too prevalent in the sports lexicon for it to be ignored now. Especially in basketball and hockey where there is such a high correlation between top 5 picks and best players in the league and there is such a premium on having those elite players during their cheap years of team control under the cap.

You are making this entire argument through the lens of prioritizing the entertainment value of a random team trying to win a random individual regular season game. Which not all fans care about to begin with, even with the current system.

The overall quality of a product, and the revenue it directly generates, no longer correlates most closely with, "Can this team put on a good show on a Tuesday night". Sports are now part of an enormous spectrum of entertainment, where the number of choices available to the consumer is an order of magnitude greater than even a decade ago. And at least to a degree, that sports bubble is certainly deflating, if not bursting, because the ROI simply isn't there for the casual fan in the majority of markets.

It's approaching the point where, either you're one of the best handful of teams in the league, or you have one or more elite Marquee players to draw people in that way, or people will invest their time/funds on other entertainment options. And things like ratings and attendance figures - across all major sports - back this up.

So if the NHL were to move to a system that encouraged as many "teams in the middle" as possible, there's good reason to believe that they'd lose a major chunk of their audience, and it would be a terrible business decision.

 

[HisNoodliness]

Honestly I think the system is fine as is. I can definitely see an argument that there should be a history component (if you got 1 OA last year your lottery odds are halved this year etc).

But what if we had a crazy system like this: the teams that miss the playoffs have their season evaluated in two parts, the first 61 games and the latter 21 games (about the TDL). You receive "draft points" through losses in the first part (worst teams get most points) and wins in the second part (best get most points) to decide draft placement. So if you want 1st OA the ideal record would be to go 0-61 in the first part and 21-0 in the second for 82 draft points. Ties are broken with your regular season record, same way as they would be for playoffs.

That way it would discourage teams from tanking their seasons when they realized they were out of it halfway through, while also rewarding those that are truly just bad. Plus the last 21 games would be super exciting as playoff teams try to fight their way in and non-playoff teams try to move up in the draft. Biggest issue I see is that it might kill the TDL.

 

[jkutswings]

Honestly I think the system is fine as is. I can definitely see an argument that there should be a history component (if you got 1 OA last year your lottery odds are halved this year etc).

But what if we had a crazy system like this: the teams that miss the playoffs have their season evaluated in two parts, the first 61 games and the latter 21 games (about the TDL). You receive "draft points" through losses in the first part (worst teams get most points) and wins in the second part (best get most points) to decide draft placement. So if you want 1st OA the ideal record would be to go 0-61 in the first part and 21-0 in the second for 82 draft points. Ties are broken with your regular season record, same way as they would be for playoffs.

That way it would discourage teams from tanking their seasons when they realized they were out of it halfway through, while also rewarding those that are truly just bad. Plus the last 21 games would be super exciting as playoff teams try to fight their way in and non-playoff teams try to move up in the draft. Biggest issue I see is that it might kill the TDL.

Not sure how feasible that might be, but kudos for creativity, if nothing else.

 

[izlez]

I still like the idea I first heard a couple years ago, talking about the NBA:

Once you are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, your Wins/OTL points go towards the draft. You draft in the order of the teams with the most draft points. So, by being the worst and being eliminated first, you have the opportunity to build up the most points, but you have to win in order to earn them.

There could still be some mild tanking to race to being eliminated, but it would be less likely to decide to tank when you still have 50 games left....and then that's only a small window before you need to start winning again.

For reference, I don't think any teams are truly mathematically eliminated yet this year.



And of course relegation would be awesome. You're one of the last place teams in the league? Congratulations, you're out of the league.

 

[ShelbyZ]

Similar to when the auto companies needed help from the government, the bottom 4 teams should have a hearing with the NHL Board where they make a detailed presentation on how that #1 pick is going to help their team improve and what they'll do additionally to supplement it. Then based on the pitches, the board votes on the eventual order.

 

[Lil Sebastian Cossa]

Similar to when the auto companies needed help from the government, the bottom 4 teams should have a hearing with the NHL Board where they make a detailed presentation on how that #1 pick is going to help their team improve and what they'll do additionally to supplement it. Then based on the pitches, the board votes on the eventual order.

Eh, to really make it work, you'd have to have the bottom four teams be looked at for contraction. And they need the lotto pick to stave it off.

And funnily enough, you'd have the Wings go to the presentation saying "we'll take whatever pick you give us because we can make it through", the NHL board would go apoplectic and say they're being too loosey goosey about everything, and then the Wings decide to just rebuild without the help of the bottom 4 hearing.

So the other teams will get a free top 3 pick but the Wings will get the notoriety for not having to get saved by the league.

You are making this entire argument through the lens of prioritizing the entertainment value of a random team trying to win a random individual regular season game. Which not all fans care about to begin with, even with the current system.

The overall quality of a product, and the revenue it directly generates, no longer correlates most closely with, "Can this team put on a good show on a Tuesday night". Sports are now part of an enormous spectrum of entertainment, where the number of choices available to the consumer is an order of magnitude greater than even a decade ago. And at least to a degree, that sports bubble is certainly deflating, if not bursting, because the ROI simply isn't there for the casual fan in the majority of markets.

It's approaching the point where, either you're one of the best handful of teams in the league, or you have one or more elite Marquee players to draw people in that way, or people will invest their time/funds on other entertainment options. And things like ratings and attendance figures - across all major sports - back this up.

So if the NHL were to move to a system that encouraged as many "teams in the middle" as possible, there's good reason to believe that they'd lose a major chunk of their audience, and it would be a terrible business decision.​

Eventually fans will wise up to the tanking as well. You're playing a dangerous dangerous game by willingly throwing away seasons. For every Pittsburgh or Chicago, you get an Edmonton or Arizona where they've been bad, kinda on purpose, for years and they have nothing to show for it. If you get sold a bill of goods that "we are sucking now so we can be good later" and you're not good later? People will be pissed or even worse give up on you.

And it is troubling that your response to "the ROI isn't there for fanbases in most markets" is to further devalue the ROI in those markets until, by god, they happen to get lucky enough to hit on a guy. The regular season games are becoming irrelevant because you can pretty much write the playoff teams in pen on the playoff brackets before the year starts. Like, no NBA regular season game means anything because two or three teams have any shot at the title.

 

[ShelbyZ]

Eh, to really make it work, you'd have to have the bottom four teams be looked at for contraction. And they need the lotto pick to stave it off.

And funnily enough, you'd have the Wings go to the presentation saying "we'll take whatever pick you give us because we can make it through", the NHL board would go apoplectic and say they're being too loosey goosey about everything, and then the Wings decide to just rebuild without the help of the bottom 4 hearing.

So the other teams will get a free top 3 pick but the Wings will get the notoriety for not having to get saved by the league.

I just figured they could televise it and it would be fun to watch them grill the Oilers for mishandling previous top picks.

 

[OldnotDeadWings]

I think what you're really going for with that proposed model is to guard against poor sportsmanship, and penalize those teams that continue to make bad decisions.

Instead of via draft order, I'd rather accomplish that via the European soccer model, where there are two tiers of the league, based on wins and losses. I'd even have different revenue sharing for each tier, with a progressive curve, to hit bad owners in the pocketbook (and hit them harder for each consecutive year they're a cellar dweller).

If you created a major difference between the potential profits from doing your job as a front office, and being a nimrod of an organization for 5-10 years, that might even eliminate the need for a lottery altogether.

I like the way European soccer does it too. Fighting to avoid demotion or earn promotion is a huge part of the season. But let’s face it, it has become more elitist than ever over the past decade, with rich owners ruling the roost. A Leicester City type of season was exciting because everyone knows the high odds against it ever happening again. NA pro sports leagues would need a huge sea change in culture to implement the same kind of system and that is probably less likely than even a radical change in the lottery.

 

[Flowah]

No... what's not healthy for the league is having several teams just piss away season after season by chasing a top pick. The issue with tanking is that it's essentially a student in class that's realistically a C student actively ****ing up every test because he wants to get the bonkers hot tutor to help him out. That the sickest patient is actively trying to contaminate his wounds or exacerbate his symptoms to jump to the front of the line.

I don't think many teams, if any, purposefully set out to tank. Buffalo isn't bad this year because they're trying to be. Nor was Edmonton or even Arizona or Montreal. These were teams that were predicted to be better. They weren't. Are they trying to tank now? Maybe.

Also, which team's goal is it to tank forever? I doubt it's ever been anyone's goal. You might tank for a few seasons but ultimately the only reason you tank is to get the elite franchise player who lets your team compete. The goal is always to compete.

 

[TheMule93]

Vancouver is the only team that I can think of that wasn't trying to actively be competitive this season

 

[OldnotDeadWings]

"... the fact is that elite players outside the top5 are incredibly rare. Yes they exist. Yes there's, in an absolute sense, a lot of them around the league. But that's because you're not doing the math right. You're looking at how many players are found in ~200 picks in the entire rest of the draft versus the top5. Yes of course out of 200 picks a year there will be some top talent that slipped through the cracks. But it's a tiny percentage change that speaks to randomness and luck, not repeatable scouting skill.

It's not a fact when it comes to defensemen, who make up about 40 per cent of draft picks per year. The fact is that exceptional defensemen of a particular draft year, whether Norris Trophy winners or the leading scoring defenseman of that peer group (first 18 defensemen selected overall), are almost equally distributed amongst equal-sized sample groups through the middle of the second round and sometimes beyond that depending on the number of defensemen drafted.

Prior to Burns winning the Norris Trophy last year there had been 10 different winners in the previous 19 years. Three of those 10 were among the first six defensemen picked in their Draft year (Doughty, Niedermayer and Pronger); two Norris winners were defensemen picked 7th-12th (Karlsson, MacInnis); three were picked from the third group of six (Subban, Keith, Blake); and two were picked from what would be the fourth group (Lidstrom, the 19th overall defenseman in 1989) and Chara (22nd.overall in 1996). Burns bumped the Group 1 total to four winners in the past 20 years, but Burns himself was a 20th overall pick (fifth defenseman selected) in 2003.

 

[Pavels Dog]

Yeah, this is how I look at it. And my perception of Holland's comments has been there is even a level of hubris there, where he thinks he won't have to resort to what all of the other teams have had to do to re-build a team. Almost as if he is "above" that.

That said, everyone is more reliant on luck than they were before. As we know, the best you can possibly do is a 48% chance at a top 3 pick. Would Holland have the same outlook if the lottery remained how it was? Maybe not, hard to say.

I just don’t think Holland believes in shortcuts.
It’s so easy to look at Chicago, Pittsburgh or even Toronto and think we can skip to the final step and immediately have the same success. If Toronto did their tank BEFORE landing Rielly, Kadri and Nylander and without signing Babcock they’d still be stuck in the mud like so many others. We’ve found Larkin, Mantha.. MAYBE we have something in Hronek/Cholo/Ras.. we could legit use a top 3 pick or two, but too many are underestimating the actual time it takes for players to develop and establish themselves in the NHL. You can’t draft at the top for a few years and immediately be a contender. Collect talent at all levels of the draft. If we play our cards right and get a little luck we won’t need to hit the extended depths of suckitude that others have needed, but rather emulate Boston/LA/Anaheim/etc (and those pesky Red Wings).

 

[jkutswings]

I just don’t think Holland believes in shortcuts.
It’s so easy to look at Chicago, Pittsburgh or even Toronto and think we can skip to the final step and immediately have the same success. If Toronto did their tank BEFORE landing Rielly, Kadri and Nylander and without signing Babcock they’d still be stuck in the mud like so many others. We’ve found Larkin, Mantha.. MAYBE we have something in Hronek/Cholo/Ras.. we could legit use a top 3 pick or two, but too many are underestimating the actual time it takes for players to develop and establish themselves in the NHL. You can’t draft at the top for a few years and immediately be a contender. Collect talent at all levels of the draft. If we play our cards right and get a little luck we won’t need to hit the extended depths of suckitude that others have needed, but rather emulate Boston/LA/Anaheim/etc (and those pesky Red Wings).

Personally, I'm not contending that there is only one chronological order to acquire the various tiers or degrees of talent. I'm saying that the approach Detroit is using makes it harder to acquire elite players, and if they never acquire any elite players, they'll never win another Cup.

I truly believe that with the current staff, that at least one lottery pick is mandatory, because I don't think their scouts/player evaluations will ever be collectively good enough to build a contender without a prospect ranked that high.

 

[kliq]

I can't help but feel all this "all out of playoff teams should have the same odds!!!!" talk is just sour grapes over the fact that we probably won't win the lottery.

Yes, the worst teams deserve more help. Just like the worst student in class needs more attention from the teacher or the sickest patient gets the doctors first. That's how it works and that's fine.

Anything else increases the odds that a team that's just actually bad stays bad. That's not healthy for the game or the league. You can talk all you want about scouts but the fact is that elite players outside the top5 are incredibly rare. Yes they exist. Yes there's, in an absolute sense, a lot of them around the league. But that's because you're not doing the math right. You're looking at how many players are found in ~200 picks in the entire rest of the draft versus the top5. Yes of course out of 200 picks a year there will be some top talent that slipped through the cracks. But it's a tiny percentage change that speaks to randomness and luck, not repeatable scouting skill.

Truly not at all. If anything, giving us a 1/15 chance this year I feel will hurt our odds as I think we are going to continue to drop in the standings. My issue is the fact that inept teams are being rewarded for being inept with Edmonton being the best example. Plus, the idea of tanking is beginning to pick up steam, and I do not want to see a league where half of the teams are "tanking" because they want a lottery pick.

 

[Pavels Dog]

Personally, I'm not contending that there is only one chronological order to acquire the various tiers or degrees of talent. I'm saying that the approach Detroit is using makes it harder to acquire elite players, and if they never acquire any elite players, they'll never win another Cup.

I truly believe that with the current staff, that at least one lottery pick is mandatory, because I don't think their scouts/player evaluations will ever be collectively good enough to build a contender without a prospect ranked that high.

Lottery-wise, finishing 5-10 is pretty good tbh. Decent odds of a top 3 pick, still good enough to not be impossible to turn around and there’s always good talent at 5-10 too.
If anything, the strategy of tanking into the bottom 3 is what has become vastly more risky. Actually finishing last is extremely difficult and requires a much worse GM than Holland, and even then you draft #4 at worst. No strategy is perfect, and elite talent being needed goes without saying.. let’s give it at least one more non-playoff draft year before deeming Holland’s strategy as failed.

 

[Frk It]

I just don’t think Holland believes in shortcuts.
It’s so easy to look at Chicago, Pittsburgh or even Toronto and think we can skip to the final step and immediately have the same success. If Toronto did their tank BEFORE landing Rielly, Kadri and Nylander and without signing Babcock they’d still be stuck in the mud like so many others. We’ve found Larkin, Mantha.. MAYBE we have something in Hronek/Cholo/Ras.. we could legit use a top 3 pick or two, but too many are underestimating the actual time it takes for players to develop and establish themselves in the NHL. You can’t draft at the top for a few years and immediately be a contender. Collect talent at all levels of the draft. If we play our cards right and get a little luck we won’t need to hit the extended depths of suckitude that others have needed, but rather emulate Boston/LA/Anaheim/etc (and those pesky Red Wings).

Understandable... but you would have to agree that it is pretty ambitious, no? Probably with a higher margin of error?

 

[jkutswings]

Plus, the idea of tanking is beginning to pick up steam, and I do not want to see a league where half of the teams are "tanking" because they want a lottery pick.

To play devil's advocate, suppose you're a team that's routinely in the bottom half of the league. Even if the league makes it more punitive, what draw is there to fight to stay in the middle, versus shooting for as high a pick as possible? If you're already a below average product, why keep trying to succeed with that quality of incoming talent (statistically speaking), instead of going after a (statistically speaking) much more impactful player?

 

[Unfriendly Ghost]

The draft lottery is not a reward. That's like saying EBT or foodstamps are a reward. Draft position is given to the worst possible teams to help them get a little less bad and give them a foothold to climb out of their situation.