This is ridiculous. Who are the teams who get to the Stanley Cup finals? The teams that have their bottom 6 filled out by strong contributors on ELCs. Look at Pittsburgh. Look at Nashville. Look at San Jose. To be a contender in today's NHL under the current system, you need to draft very well for a few years in a row. Then to sustain it, you need to keep drafting well. That's the blue-print that all the top teams have. When their window closes, it's because they've either traded away picks for too long, or they've stopped being able to produce that push from the bottom because they've stopped producing talent from drafting and development. This is the ultimate system to reward good drafting. A soft cap goes part-way, because it rewards good drafting for a short period of time, and doesn't punish you if you can't keep drafting well. A hard cap ruthlessly forces you to continue with good drafting.
This is a very weak attempt at a tinfoil hat conspiracy. First of all, these two lotteries you're clearly referring to were not the "first two years of the lottery" no matter how you want to slice it. They weren't even each conducted with the same lottery system. There's been a lottery since 1995, and the Kings won that one.
Second of all, the NHL has shown time and time again that they care much, much more about making American fans happy than Canadian fans. That is where the biggest market is, thus that is where the money is, and thus that is where the priority is, so your proposed motive makes no sense to begin with on that front. But beyond that, the "NHL," which you are referring to here as some mysterious otherworldly entity is really just the owners of all the NHL teams, plus a few executives to organize them and represent them as one, and so you're alleging that all of the owners here have agreed to a conspiracy to divert phenom players to the few Canadian teams. Not really a realistic scenario. Or, perhaps, the draft lottery was instated in good faith by the owners, but Gary Bettman is rigging it anyway, running a massive risk of corruption charges and paying off a whole room-full of people each year for their silence (and must be paying a hefty amount for not even one person to blow the whistle in all this time). And, of course, you're alleging that, even after seeing how Sidney Crosby resurrected a Pittsburgh market from the brink of relocation and made them a huge cash-cow for the league again, he's come to the conclusion that the most sensible course is to gift number one picks to the rock-solid markets that don't really have any room for growth anyway.
Maybe stop and think about it. I know you probably come onto this topic with long-standing pre-existing hatred for the concept of a salary cap, for some reason. Maybe it's because you enjoyed what the Rangers did pre-cap. Maybe it's because you're a Yankees fan? Not sure. But your arguments here are extremely sloppy and not at all sensible.
