If every team missing the playoffs has the same chance of winning, it would at least force the worst ones to invest in their scouting. Boston is constantly finding great players without any high draft picks, and there are more examples.
The problem is that the best talents in the draft are almost always known to everyone, so there's no actual benefit to better scouting there because everyone is going to pick Crosby or McDavid or Bedard and its just a matter of who gets lucky, no skill involved.
Teams like Boston and Detroit from the 90s are outliers, it isn't a reliable method of replenishing a prospect pool to cross your fingers and hope good players slip into the 20s every year
I understand why it's done, I just don't agree with the method. It's like rewarding the poorest performing companies with tax money and claim you're evening the field.
Of course the NHL is "socialist", it's a collectively bargained league of 32 separate subordinate franchises, the teams actively negotiate and collude with one another and depend on the business successes of one another in order to thrive
Even if they had scored 20 even strength goals rather than 6 in line with their xGF number they'd still have a -16 goal differential at even strength
I'm not disagreeing with any of this, as I said, the Sharks are bad. They are very clearly the worst in the league. But they are better than their -43 goal differential suggests.
They probably could be better than this, but part of their streak of bad luck is also the insane schedule they had to start the year
While that's true, Anaheim was also to set up to fail by the same schedule makers, but have persevered. Their first 5 games were against Vegas, Carolina, Dallas, Arizona, and Boston. In total, Anaheim has played:
The real difference is that Anaheim has already started collecting young talent and is much further along in their rebuild than the Sharks are
Not all team locations are created equal. And that affects your ability to either attract or retain Free Agents.
Goalies just miss 3% of the time on NHL average low danger shots.
the difference is drafting.
This is definitely true. We are a bad team -- but having attended 10-1 and watched 10-2, those games should have been more like 7-3 and 7-4. Horrible losses, but not historic. The puck luck is really bad. But... low skill and no good system will make your bad luck, just like lots of skill and a good system will make your good luck. If the Gods had ordained a "fair" first 11 games, I bet the sharks would have already won 1 or 2. Max. But now the confidence is gone and the morale is obviously low.
Definitely we would still be very bad. weastern has been on the "Sharks will be historically bad" train on the Sharks boards all year and he's convincing me, but I do think that luck has made it a smidge worse than it should have been.
Yes, absolutely our drafting was subpar in the 2010's. Step 1 to fixing the draft/development pipeline is to hire a new GM and clean house, which has been done. Grier's first draft was 3 days after he was hired, and he still made a ballsy move that the jury is out on (trading down from 11... if Bystedt hits, it'll be a win). This past draft, there was a clear direction and it seemed to be a successful draft given what we know at the time, although he may be judged in history for passing on Michkov (assuming Michkov did not tell him he didn't want to play for the Sharks).
