Draft lottery 'luck' isn't what you think it is

[Homelander]

It wasn't fixed and it wasn't rigged. C'mon. If they were going to rig it, why would they do it for a small-to-mid market team like the Islanders?

 

[miscs75]

When Alexander Daigle's son or grandson is the consensus #1 pick the Ducks will win the lottery.

He’ll be a generational talent and go to a red/whute/blue wearing original 6 franchise. You guys will win the year the top prospects is a diehard Kings or Sharks fan.

 

[GRob83]

I won't pretend to know the draft history of every team, but some teams have been competitive with no high draft picks at all. The Capitals for instance have had 1 Top-10 pick in the last 18 years but make the playoffs more often than not and have a Cup win. They've gotten good results from high picks that other franchises gave up on and have exceptional team chemistry and a strong bond throughout the locker room. Ryan Leonard will maintain rookie eligibility through next season and is the only player on the roster that the Capitals have drafted in the Top-10 in the last 20 years.

 

[CowbellConray]

I dont like the draft lottery, I think it's just a way to sell "luck" as a management factor - which is stupid. With that said, good for Utah and NYI, they get good players now in what is a crappy draft...

 

[SirloinUB]

Luck manifests in different ways.

Moving up or down is part of it.
Being bad at the right is part of.
Did you scout a good player while he is having an off day?
Or maybe you scouted a mediocre player when he had a couple of incredible games.
how the teams drafting before you make their picks is also part of it.

 

[PistolPete]

This is a horrible idea and one that would spell doom for many franchises. It would be nearly impossible for basement teams to get out of the basement.

Not necessarily.

With salaries not being an issue, it comes down to several other factors:

-Desirability of the team's location
-Playing time- the top teams want to win now and as such aren't going to be able to guarantee a good amount of playing time from the get go
-Reputation: players and agents talk and if a team had a good reputation it's going to attract new players

This kind if system always punishes teams for poor management such as tanking, bad culture, ineptitude in general etc

 

[PistolPete]

I'll do you one even further... I was born and raised in Arizona and even had full season tickets to the Coyotes!

I've always regretted not going down there while my Inlaws lived there and taking in a game.

 

[PistolPete]

It’s why the NHL is arguably the most challenging when it comes to the draft - 18 yr olds who are still physically and mentally developing and what you get when they reach age 22 and older is a big ‘?’

It's a crapshoot at all ages. NFL and NBA players are in their early w0s ans many are still fails.

 

[PistolPete]

So you want to only see big market american cities get success and other teams get screwed? Why would Canadian teams go for such garbage? Unless you want to league to contract to 16 teams because you know damn well teams.like Nashville, Columbus, Utah, Buffallo, Ottawa, Calgary etc. Arent going to survive.

Why not?

There are many factors for why a player would choose a team other than the name of the city.

And if there are cities that are utterly undesirable, maybe they should be relocated? Such is the nature of business

 

[Ace Card Bedard]

It wasn't fixed and it wasn't rigged. C'mon. If they were going to rig it, why would they do it for a small-to-mid market team like the Islanders?

Saving Mckenna for the big market.

 

[Homelander]

Saving Mckenna for the big market.

We can only hope...unless Drury is foolish enough to keep this year's pick

 

[Captain Mountain]

Not necessarily.

With salaries not being an issue, it comes down to several other factors:

-Desirability of the team's location
-Playing time- the top teams want to win now and as such aren't going to be able to guarantee a good amount of playing time from the get go
-Reputation: players and agents talk and if a team had a good reputation it's going to attract new players

This kind if system always punishes teams for poor management such as tanking, bad culture, ineptitude in general etc

In a world without the entry draft, many top players will have contracts/their rights locked up well before they turn 18.

Desirability/Playing time/Reputation will all be distant factors behind which teams gave me/my family money and training when I was a kid in exchange for signing me to a contract (or getting first shot and signing me to a contract).

The trend in sports for clear business reasons is that the league is the business, not the individual teams. Without the draft teams with the means will create massive talent pipelines starting at early ages (as what happened before the draft and happens in leagues without entry drafts). You'll see partnerships with teams or leagues in Europe which do the same thing. And the ultimate result will be a league with higher overhead, potentially more vulnerable to a rival league, less parity and one less premier annual event.

 

[JohanFranzenstein]

And they got jumped twice in 2020, dropping from 1st to 4th. But would they actually want Lafreniere over Raymond today? Or Byfield, or even Stutzle?

Consensus was the Wings would've drafted Stutzle #1OA if they won the lottery. A positonal need and one of Seiders good friends.

Wings and Canucks can at least take solace knowing they've been f***ed by the draft the same amount of times, and both had incompetent morons taking a total putz instead of a franchise cornerstone (Juolevi over Tkachuk, Zadina over Hughes)

 

[FiveTacos]

It's a crapshoot at all ages. NFL and NBA players are in their early w0s ans many are still fails.

The NFL in particular is highly dependent on when the right QB is available at the right time. And it's one of the hardest positions to scout in all of sports, because so much of it comes down to things you can't really measure, and only a few games a year in college (most of which are between mismatched teams/players) doesn't give you a ton of good samples to work from.

Basketball scouting is more murky than it used to be now that guys are being drafted out of HS. Used to be mostly seniors with a few obviously precocious and talented underclassmen mixed in.

 

[Terry Yake]

It wasn't fixed and it wasn't rigged. C'mon. If they were going to rig it, why would they do it for a small-to-mid market team like the Islanders?

to save one of boston, chicago, or pittsburgh for mckenna next year obviously

 

[Djp]

I won't pretend to know the draft history of every team, but some teams have been competitive with no high draft picks at all. The Capitals for instance have had 1 Top-10 pick in the last 18 years but make the playoffs more often than not and have a Cup win.

Wrong---Caps had 3 top 5 picks
Pittsburgh had 4
Colorado had 3
Tampa bay had at leadt 3
Florida had 3 at least
Chicago had 2 in jane/ toews
Kings had 2
Boston had 3
Edmonton had 4

They've gotten good results from high picks that other franchises gave up on and have exceptional team chemistry and a strong bond throughout the locker room. Ryan Leonard will maintain rookie eligibility through next season and is the only player on the roster that the Capitals have drafted in the Top-10 in the last 20 years.

 

[Gnashville]

Tell that to us Predators fans we went from 3rd to 5th

 

[ManofSteel55]

I won't pretend to know the draft history of every team, but some teams have been competitive with no high draft picks at all. The Capitals for instance have had 1 Top-10 pick in the last 18 years but make the playoffs more often than not and have a Cup win. They've gotten good results from high picks that other franchises gave up on and have exceptional team chemistry and a strong bond throughout the locker room. Ryan Leonard will maintain rookie eligibility through next season and is the only player on the roster that the Capitals have drafted in the Top-10 in the last 20 years.

They did have top 5 picks for 3 out of 4 years right before that though, and I believe all three of those players (Ovechkin, Backstrom, Alzner) were important parts of that cup run. They've done a great job of building around Ovi after Backstrom and Alzner were gone though, that's true.

 

[shello]

To be fair to Laf, the Rangers can’t develop players

 

[BB79]

A lot of drafting is luck...luck of how who you pick turns out. Rangers and Kings could have had Stutzle and passed for LaFreniere and Byfield. 2019, Caufield went 15th, after Cam York and Victor Soderstrom who ended up going back to Sweden..Uffhh.... ok, not quite as bad as Ottawa taking Alexandre Daigle over Pronger or Kariya in 93. In all fairness, LaFreniere hasn't been bad, just expected more from him with the hype surrounding him

Some are late bloomers. Tim Thomas, remember him? Drafted in 1994 by the Nordiques, 217th overall. Took him forever to get to the NHL, then carried the Bruins to a cup.

What about other sports? Tom Brady, 2000 draft, 199th overall pick. Ends up being the greatest QB of our time, if not all time.

You never know what you're gonna get, Forrest.

 

[UED]

This is what unlucky looks like.

Barzal, Chabot, Kyle Connor, Boeser, Konecny, and Aho were all available.

Nope, taking Senyshyn there wasn't bad luck, it was intentional sabotage. DeBrusk was also a bad pick. Zboril was bad luck(they just took whichever dman was ranked where they were picking) but they were supposed to pick two of Barzal, Connor, Konecny with the other 2. These were the guys everyone mocked them to pick at 14 except Barzal who was mocked earlier. Both DeBrusk and Senyshyn were shocking picks.

Most likely, they picked the guys they scouted. Probably only scouted dmen for pick #14 and then they traded for 13 and 15 and just went with two forwards they scouted for their 37th and 45th picks, Senyshyn and DeBrusk, because they didn't have the intelligence to recognize that they were allowed to pick better prospects with their better picks. They didn't expect to have more picks and weren't smart enough to adjust even though they intentionally acquired the picks. Total tunnel vision and it goes to show that NHL GMs should not be respected at all.

 

[fbuford]

I don’t even remember where these guys were relative to their draft rankings.

Although I do recall Senyshyn was an off the board pick. Zboril was around that 12-20 range. Not sure about Jake.

Zboril, Debrusk were both outside the top 20. And Senyshyn wasn't even a 1st round projected pick.

 

[gstommylee]

People have a weird take on the word "luck" around here in terms of the NHL draft lottery.

People seem to conflate the lottery with an “amount of high picks” thing. But actually it’s more about what players your lottery win gives you access to, or prevents you from accessing.

Luck doesn’t involve being good or crappy, it just means having the ping pong balls bounce in such a way that it alters the trajectory of a team.

These are the luckiest bounces ever in NHL draft lottery history:

- [ ] Edmonton in 2015, moved up 2 spots to get Connor McDavid. Enough said.

- [ ] Colorado won in 2013, jumping from 2nd to 1st to get Nate McKinnon. The alternative could have been Barkov, but more likely was Seth Jones.

- [ ] Yes, they finished last to “earn” the slot, but the 2016 Leafs still only had a 1-in-5 chance at Auston Matthews in a year with a huge drop-off to #2

- [ ] New Jersey in 2019 jumped up 3 spots to grab Jack Hughes in a year where the alternatives were not even close

- [ ] The Rangers in 2020, won not one, but two lotteries to effectively move up 15 slots to 1st overall. Yes, they squandered it by picking Alexis Lafreniere, but that’s not luck, that’s entirely on themselves.

- [ ] Carolina hit on a 3% chance in 2018 to jump from 11 to 2. Svechnikov may be step below franchise stud, but when you look at the players picked between 8 and 20 that year, this was definitely lucky. The Islanders will be hoping they’ve just followed in those footsteps, and not in those of Philly in 2017. That’s the year the Flyers went from 13 to 2 and whiffed with Nolan Patrick.

- [ ] But you don’t have to win the lottery to win the draft. In 2017, 3 teams jumped over last-pace Colorado, and the Avs came up smelling like a rose with the best player in the draft at 4, Cale Maker.

- [ ] Vancouver fell a spot in 2018 and had the best player in that draft drop into their laps. Can you imagine Canuck fans today if had stayed at 6, picked Filip Zadina and watched Quinn Hughes slide to the Rangers?



As for unlucky bounces, they are often overrated, just like the guarantee of getting a stud in the top 5 is overstated. The test of time clearly shows how that really varies from year to year. And dropping a spot or two in that range hasn’t really made much of a difference.

- [ ] The worst example of teams getting shafted by the lottery balls, may have actually been in 2017, and it didn’t affect the top teams. The Rangers and the Knights may have been ‘settling’ for Makar, Pettersson or Heiskanen instead of Cody Glass and Lias Andersson if not for the lottery pushing Dallas, Philly and New Jersey past them.

- [ ] Buffalo in 2015, dropped 1 spot to miss out on Connor McDavid. That said, the fact that Jack Eichel was a worthy #1 most other years mitigated that.

- [ ] Maybe I should feel sorry for Phoenix missing out after ‘earning’ Eichel in 2015, but I don’t, not when they took Strome over Marner.

- [ ] Detroit got jumped in 2018, but saw two reaches taken ahead of them in Hayton and Kotkaniemi. They weren’t getting Tkachuk and taking Zadina over Hughes is all on them.

- [ ] And they got jumped twice in 2020, dropping from 1st to 4th. But would they actually want Lafreniere over Raymond today? Or Byfield, or even Stutzle?

- [ ] Vancouver got jumped twice in 2017 and still ended up with Pettersson — prior to this season frequently ranked as that year’s 2nd-best player

- [ ] And I’m not going to feel sorry for the Canucks for getting jumped twice in 2016 either. Matthew Tkachuk and Keller were still on the board and they chose Juolevi.

The more recent drafts are a little harder to call because we don’t have a big enough sample size yet. Did winning the lottery in 2021 or 2022 really matter? Bedard was supposed to be a different story in 2023, and probably will be, but right now is he that much better than Fantilli and Carlsson and Michkov?

Winning — or losing — the lottery frequently doesn’t match the hype.

Laf was going to go 1OA regardless of who had 1OA for the year. Not lafs fault NYR can't develop players.

 

[Colezuki]

You want hype? Get rid of the draft entirely and have the teams recruit the rookies.

Would any Canadian team see another top 20 ranked prospect?

How many players would sign with their favourite team growing up? Or the team closest to them?

How many rookies can increase chances of success by finding a good fit rather than being compelled to go to a market?

If we do this you unleash the Canadian teams with no salary cap and then see how this goes, MTL/ TOR/NYR/BOS/CHI would have every top star moving forward, with Vancouver not too far behind for the west coast kids.

 

[GRob83]

They did have top 5 picks for 3 out of 4 years right before that though, and I believe all three of those players (Ovechkin, Backstrom, Alzner) were important parts of that cup run. They've done a great job of building around Ovi after Backstrom and Alzner were gone though, that's true.

Alzner was on the Canadiens when the Capitals won in 2018. The Capitals themselves have not drafted in the Top-5 since 2007 and have only 1 Top-10 pick since then (Ryan Leonard).