The Silver Plan: A Draft Lottery Alternative

This is very well thought out and I think it is an improvement on the Gold Plan. I still prefer a straight lottery.

The main thing to me is that any draft system is in place in order to give teams that are bad now the best chances to be good in the future. It's an idea that makes a ton of sense in closed leagues with no promotion/relegation and no academy system. Yes, a system where draft order is a direct function of your place in the standings does incentivize teams to lose, which sucks. The Gold Plan and your Silver Plan do not change this fact, they just shift the incentives on when to lose.

In both systems, you are encouraged to be extremely bad at the start of the season. The Silver System cleans up the Gold in this regard as you point out by standardizing what the inflection point is for every team, but the directive is still clear -- lose as much as you can for the first 62 games and then win as much as you can afterwards.

It does still give you 20 games of not cheering for your team to lose which certainly is not nothing. I think that is outweighed by the fact that (especially in a sport as streaky/sequencing heavy as hockey) it allows for "runs" to affect the final draft order in a way too pronounced way. Why does it matter whether a win came in the first 62 games of the year vs. the last 20? Teams that stay on pace for the playoffs in the first 3/4s of the season but fall off down the stretch like Seattle get doubly punished while teams like Pittsburgh who make a late push but fall short are doubly rewarded. For the teams fighting at the bottom, the timing of an injury or a really hot/cold goalie month becomes even more of a factor.

Ultimately the only way to fix tanking is to get rid of a draft system. That comes with its whole own set of problems though, as a cursory glance at the landscape of European Soccer or the MLB's international posting system would give you. Absent that, the two best ways to mitigate it are:

1) massaging the lottery odds to put exactly the right amount of randomness into the system. While I think the NHL is closer than the NBA, I don't think either league has found the exact balance here yet and I think the NHL went backwards with its most recent set of changes.
2) Having the nature of your sport be such that one individual player cannot make that outsized a difference. This is where the NBA's biggest problem is.

TLDR: I like this mechanically more than the Gold Plan, but at a broader "philosophical" level I still don't like either.
That's a fair critique. I agree a potential major flaw would be teams as you described winning more or less in the first 62 vs the last 20.

I think I approached this more from a fan perspective than a fairness perspective. Having cheered for teams that miss the playoffs (Avs in the past and Montreal more recently), the start of the season was never an issue. There are always interesting things going on with the team, new players, and all the possibilities a new season represents. However, by the time of the trade deadline, teams are pretty well sorted into teams with a chance at the playoffs and teams who are going to miss. Honestly, it's just no fun watching a team play when winning actively hurts them, especially when they are unlikely to get a good draft pick anyway. Now for some teams that difficulty sets in far sooner than game 63, but having the last 20 games being meaningful would at least give fans on non-playoff teams something to enjoy at the end of the year.

In terms of your lottery ideas, personally I just don't like the idea of a lottery at all. If we're going to reward teams for being bad and encourage bad teams to lose, then I'd prefer just a straight reverse order draft. I don't think any level of randomness is going to prevent tanking, which seems to be the purpose of a lottery system.
 
That's a fair critique. I agree a potential major flaw would be teams as you described winning more or less in the first 62 vs the last 20.

I think I approached this more from a fan perspective than a fairness perspective. Having cheered for teams that miss the playoffs (Avs in the past and Montreal more recently), the start of the season was never an issue. There are always interesting things going on with the team, new players, and all the possibilities a new season represents. However, by the time of the trade deadline, teams are pretty well sorted into teams with a chance at the playoffs and teams who are going to miss. Honestly, it's just no fun watching a team play when winning actively hurts them, especially when they are unlikely to get a good draft pick anyway. Now for some teams that difficulty sets in far sooner than game 63, but having the last 20 games being meaningful would at least give fans on non-playoff teams something to enjoy at the end of the year.
That definitely makes sense and I agree is a benefit to the system. I think where it fails is honestly not with the true bottom 5 teams but with the playoff bubble and once again would become extra frustrating to fans of teams that were in it up until the TDL but fall apart afterwards. I also think that with a cut-off, there would just be even more incentive for the Chicagos and San Joses of the world to tank noticeably harder at the start of the season.
In terms of your lottery ideas, personally I just don't like the idea of a lottery at all. If we're going to reward teams for being bad and encourage bad teams to lose, then I'd prefer just a straight reverse order draft. I don't think any level of randomness is going to prevent tanking, which seems to be the purpose of a lottery system.
A lottery doesn't prevent tanking but it lessens its impact by making the difference between 32 and 31, and 31 and 30, and so on not quite as large
 
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I would also add that the ultimate "incentive" for teams to not tank anymore is to obtain good players by picking at the top of the draft. Trust me as a Wizards fan, getting stuck in a cycle where you are tanking and awful every single year only to end up with the 5th pick sucks and incentivizes teams to be bad for longer
 
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This doesn’t happen. No team wants to lose!
Right now, is it better objectively for Pittsburgh to win or lose games? Under the current system, it is better for them to lose so they can get a better draft pick. Look at the Draft Lottery thread. The 7th post is a Pens fan who wrote, "Penguins saw fit to start winning games so...yeah that sucks."

The players may not want to lose, but fans and GMs do if they are smart.
 
That definitely makes sense and I agree is a benefit to the system. I think where it fails is honestly not with the true bottom 5 teams but with the playoff bubble and once again would become extra frustrating to fans of teams that were in it up until the TDL but fall apart afterwards. I also think that with a cut-off, there would just be even more incentive for the Chicagos and San Joses of the world to tank noticeably harder at the start of the season.

A lottery doesn't prevent tanking but it lessens its impact by making the difference between 32 and 31, and 31 and 30, and so on not quite as large

I would also add that the ultimate "incentive" for teams to not tank anymore is to obtain good players by picking at the top of the draft. Trust me as a Wizards fan, getting stuck in a cycle where you are tanking and awful every single year only to end up with the 5th pick sucks and incentivizes teams to be bad for longer
The thing with tanking early in the season is it might be hard to stop suddenly in the final 20 games. I think it's much easier to tank in the back half of the season than at the start. But yeah, this system would be frustrating for teams that fall apart after the deadline, but I don't think it would be possible to find a system where fans of such a team wouldn't be frustrated.

As for the lottery, yes it does mitigate the impact of tanking, but to me that's like putting a bandaid on a broken leg. I don't actually see an issue with tanking. I just want fans of tanking teams to still be able to cheer for their team to win.

Lastly, I don't think it my system it would be common to have bottom teams drop to 5th, unless there were a close cluster of teams at the bottom, in which case any system would have those teams shuffle depending on their play. What might be my favorite part of my system is if a team is truly awful, they are pretty much guaranteed a very high draft pick, if not 1st overall.
 
Where's the evidence that teams tanking is a problem? Are all the teams fighting for a playoff spot going on losing streaks evidence? Or maybe it's the Sabres beating the Caps and looking all world as of late. I see lower teams still trying hard -- Ducks, Kraken, Sabres, etc.

Plenty of players on bad teams have to worry about doing well for next contract reasons. Add that these are competitive athletes who hate to lose. Also, teams out of the race many times want to evaluate prospects so they give them a look. Are those things considered tanking?

Tanking is not a problem in the NHL. No point in trying to solve a [problem that doesn't exist, especially in a league with so much parity.
 
Where's the evidence that teams tanking is a problem? Are all the teams fighting for a playoff spot going on losing streaks evidence? Or maybe it's the Sabres beating the Caps and looking all world as of late. I see lower teams still trying hard -- Ducks, Kraken, Sabres, etc.

Plenty of players on bad teams have to worry about doing well for next contract reasons. Add that these are competitive athletes who hate to lose. Also, teams out of the race many times want to evaluate prospects so they give them a look. Are those things considered tanking?

Tanking is not a problem in the NHL. No point in trying to solve a [problem that doesn't exist, especially in a league with so much parity.
I think you may be in the wrong thread, friend. This idea isn't about preventing tanking. Of course players don't tank. Teams generally try to improve each year, even if they know they are going to be bad. When tanking has been brought up in this thread, I believe it's in the context of teams like Chicago and San Jose this year who iced a sub-par roster and traded away useful players.
 
Price on trade deadline rentals would go through the roof as you would probably see bottoming teams try to acquire players to help win the last 20 games vs just trading out rentals and would probably hurt the playoff product
 
Price on trade deadline rentals would go through the roof as you would probably see bottoming teams try to acquire players to help win the last 20 games vs just trading out rentals and would probably hurt the playoff product
Prices were already through the roof this season and teams were still willing to pay. The Islanders still traded Nelson even though they are and were in the hunt for the playoffs. With all the parity in the league, I don't think it would affect things that much. The teams near the playoffs would still be reluctant to trade away assets, and the teams at the bottom would be unlikely to load up just to move up one or two spots in the draft. That might change if there's a generational talent available, but that doesn't happen often. Mostly this system would just make teams balance short-term vs long term results.

I mean, the trade deadline has been going down hill for years under the current system. I used to stay home from school/work to watch deadline day, but it stopped being exciting a long time ago, outside of the rare year like this year.
 
General rule of thumb: if it's overly complicated it shouldn't be implemented.

If we had a system like this then every broadcast and youtube video and so on would have to explain how it works over and over again because most fans (especially new fans) wouldn't understand it.

On top of that it feels unnecessary to use this so it's not worth all the hassle.
 
If you want to eliminate tanking completely, and that is your entire prerogative, then the draft needs to go completely random. Do the draft lottery a year early, maybe on the eve of the current draft so that if teams want to trade up they have clarity of where their pick falls next year.

The draft is no longer about parity, it's about fair redistribution of talent. Nobody would like that, because just purely based on odds, the teams who draft high would sometimes be teams who don't "need it", but that's the only real solution.
 
General rule of thumb: if it's overly complicated it shouldn't be implemented.

If we had a system like this then every broadcast and youtube video and so on would have to explain how it works over and over again because most fans (especially new fans) wouldn't understand it.

On top of that it feels unnecessary to use this so it's not worth all the hassle.
"Starting in game 63, every point a team earns is banked as Silver Points. If the team then misses the playoffs, their Silver Points are subtracted from their total points, determining their draft position."

Tell me, is that more or less complicated than the current draft lottery system? How about the wild card playoff system?
 
If you want to eliminate tanking completely, and that is your entire prerogative, then the draft needs to go completely random. Do the draft lottery a year early, maybe on the eve of the current draft so that if teams want to trade up they have clarity of where their pick falls next year.

The draft is no longer about parity, it's about fair redistribution of talent. Nobody would like that, because just purely based on odds, the teams who draft high would sometimes be teams who don't "need it", but that's the only real solution.
I'm certainly not aiming to eliminate tanking. Was this meant as a reply to one of comments in the thread?
 
I think the cure you propose is worse than the disease.

Fans do seem to care a lot about tanking, especially in the last 20 games. GMs "tanking" is fairly uncommon, but it has happened.

GMs of bad teams would unload good players regardless of whether their team's draft position was predicated on where they finish in the standings.

The draft lottery, for all the hate it gets, is a legitimate bulwark against open tanking. Being the worst team in the league still gives you an 75% chance of not getting the 1st overall pick. The difference in odds between something like finishing 22nd and 27th isn't enough to justify making moves to make your team worse that you wouldn't have made otherwise.

Now you still have the non-lottery effects, where if you finish 32nd you're guaranteed a top3 pick, but this is an important part of parity and league dynamism.

Basically, I think tanking is more of a "fans have poor intuition for probabilities" phenomenon than an actual hockey ops one (with exceptions), and your solution would likely result in bad teams still being bad but now missing out on a better chance to improve.
 
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No

Similar ideas have been proposed in the past. More than likely what's going to happen is, the 4th or 5th worst team ends up picking 1st overall instead of the team who actually needs help. Or even in some situations, teams that were bubble WC teams.

The real problem people had was when the Oilers had three 1st overalls in a row in the early 2010s. Eliminate the possibility of a team being able to get more than two 1st overalls in a specific time span, say 3-5 years.

The draft lottery isn't perfect but I would rather not further punish a team at the bottom of the standings that actually needs help.

Also we should differentiate between tanking/rebuilding/just a bad team. Tanking is like what the Penguins did to draft Lemieux where management was literally giving away their best players and sending their starting goalie down and then coming into the locker room to yell at the players and coaches to throw the game.

That never happens anymore, I don't think there was any other instance of something like that happening period.

But honestly we don't need some fancy change to the draft lottery it's fine.
 
The players are already trying to win. This doesn’t disincentivize tanking- you still have to have a bad team to get the top picks- it just adds a weird element of randomness via “incentivizing” the players who are already playing hard to do what they’re already trying to do.
 
"Starting in game 63, every point a team earns is banked as Silver Points. If the team then misses the playoffs, their Silver Points are subtracted from their total points, determining their draft position."

Tell me, is that more or less complicated than the current draft lottery system? How about the wild card playoff system?

Yes
 
I think the cure you propose is worse than the disease.

Fans do seem to care a lot about tanking, especially in the last 20 games. GMs "tanking" is fairly uncommon, but it has happened.

GMs of bad teams would unload good players regardless of whether their team's draft position was predicated on where they finish in the standings.

The draft lottery, for all the hate it gets, is a legitimate bulwark against open tanking. Being the worst team in the league still gives you an 75% chance of not getting the 1st overall pick. The difference in odds between something like finishing 22nd and 27th isn't enough to justify making moves to make your team worse that you wouldn't have made otherwise.

Now you still have the non-lottery effects, where if you finish 32nd you're guaranteed a top3 pick, but this is an important part of parity and league dynamism.

Basically, I think tanking is more of a "fans have poor intuition for probabilities" phenomenon than an actual hockey ops one (with exceptions), and your solution would likely result in bad teams still being bad but now missing out on a better chance to improve.

The players are already trying to win. This doesn’t disincentivize tanking- you still have to have a bad team to get the top picks- it just adds a weird element of randomness via “incentivizing” the players who are already playing hard to do what they’re already trying to do.
This isn't an anti-tanking idea. I don't know why you both are responding to the system as if the goal is to put an end to tanking. The very first sentence of the original post describes the problem I am trying to solve: "I dislike how the current draft lottery system encourages fans to root for their team to lose at the end of the season to improve their draft position."
No

Similar ideas have been proposed in the past. More than likely what's going to happen is, the 4th or 5th worst team ends up picking 1st overall instead of the team who actually needs help. Or even in some situations, teams that were bubble WC teams.
Are you sure similar ideas have been proposed? I'm asking because it doesn't look like you read the idea. That's fine - nobody has to read it - but I posted the result for last season, and under this system Chicago and San Jose got the first two picks, and it would have been very, very difficult (impossible?) for any other team but those two to get the first pick.
 
I dislike how the current draft lottery system encourages fans to root for their team to lose at the end of the season to improve their draft position. I also dislike the concept of using random chance to determine draft position, especially something as important as who gets the #1 pick. I used to think the best solution was the Gold Plan. However, there are a couple of problems with it.

First, teams in different conferences can be eliminated at vastly different times, regardless of their points total, due to conference strength, which can change from year to year. Second, and more importantly, under the Gold Plan, if a team is unlikely to make the playoffs, fans are incentivized to cheer for early losses so the team is eliminated from contention as soon as possible.

With these issues in mind, let me introduce the tentatively named Silver Plan.

How It Works​

Starting in game 63, every point a team earns is banked as Silver Points. If the team then misses the playoffs, their Silver Points are subtracted from their total points, determining their draft position.

For example, in 2024, after 62 games, the Buffalo Sabres had 62 points. Over the next 20 games, they earned 22 Silver Points, giving them a final adjusted total of 40 points for draft positioning. Ties would be broken by regulation wins (more wins = better draft position) and the other usual tie-breakers.

Here's how that would work for the rest of the teams last year (OG = original draft order, NEW = Silver Plan Draft Order):

TEAM
62GP
SP
TOTAL
OG
NEW
DIF
Chicago
35​
17​
18​
2​
1
+1
San Jose
37​
10​
27​
1​
2
-1
Ottawa
54​
24​
30​
7​
3
+4
Arizona/Utah
55​
22​
33​
6​
4
+2
Columbus
52​
14​
38​
4​
5
-1
Anaheim
49​
10​
39​
3​
6
-3
Buffalo
62​
22​
40​
11​
7
+4
Pittsburgh
64​
24​
40​
14​
8
+6
Montreal
58​
18​
40​
5​
9
-4
Minnesota
64​
23​
41​
13​
10
+3
St. Louis
67​
25​
42​
16​
11
+5
New Jersey
64​
17​
47​
10​
12
-2
Calgary
67​
14​
53​
9​
13
-4
Seattle
67​
14​
53​
8​
14
-6
Detroit
72​
19​
53​
15​
15
0
Philadelphia
71​
16​
55​
12​
16
-4

Why It Works​

The biggest advantage is that it incentivizes teams to win even if they are out of playoff contention, at least for the final 20 games of the season. As shown in the table, Pittsburgh would have been rewarded for its late-season surge instead of being punished with a worse draft position. Meanwhile, Montreal’s collapse would have cost them rather than helping.

While this system changes the draft order, it does not dramatically alter the top selections. Outside of Montreal, the top seven teams remain the same, just reordered. Additionally, this system benefits teams that consistently hover around the playoff line. Under the current system, such teams rarely land top talent, keeping them stuck in the “mushy middle.” Under the Silver Plan, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Minnesota would have earned top-10 picks despite finishing near the top of the wild card race.

This system could also influence how teams approach the final stretch of the season. Columbus, Anaheim, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Montreal, Minnesota, and St. Louis would have been in a dog fight for draft positions 5-11. Suddenly, those games would carry more significance, energizing fans and motivating players to compete harder.

Think of the difference in narrative, too. Imagine Chicago going on a late season run to claim the #1 draft pick, rather than it just being awarded by the luck of the draw and as a reward for being terrible.

Now, the Gold Plan offers similar benefits, but the Silver Plan is more consistent. Every team starts accumulating Silver Points in game 63 (around the trade deadline), eliminating the need to rely on uneven playoff elimination across conferences and divisions. Teams also have 20 games to accumulate points, whereas under the Gold Plan, teams may get as few as 0–15 games, with most getting fewer than 10. As a result, the Gold Plan's benefits apply only to a small fraction of games, even for teams certain to miss the playoffs. An underrated flaw of the Gold Plan would be those last games leading up to mathematical elimination, where hardcore fans would be desperate for their team to lose.

Also, under the Gold Plan in 2023/24, Arizona/Utah would have received the second overall pick despite finishing with 77 points, while Chicago and San Jose had 52 and 47 points, respectively. San Jose, despite finishing dead last, would have dropped to the third draft position. Under the Silver Plan, Arizona would have needed to win 13 of its final 20 games just to match Chicago’s point total. It would then have had to win more games than Chicago over the remaining seven games to earn that 2nd draft slot. This scenario would be technically possible but extremely unlikely. Under the Silver Plan, the worst teams would still receive the best draft picks.

One possible drawback is that it could reduce trade activity at the deadline since teams would still be incentivized to win. However, while the trade deadline is exciting, a league where every team has a reason to compete in every game is far more compelling.

Finally, of course for the first 62 games of the season, fans of bottom-ranked teams may still hope for losses to improve their chances at a high pick. This is a flaw, but any system that rewards bad teams will have it. From what I’ve seen, this system is the best way to reward struggling teams without excessively incentivizing losing.

Thank you for reading. What do you think?

Not sure why so many people are trashing your comments - - there’s a ton of other ideas and suggestions here that are WAY dumber than yours.

Something has to be done to discourage teams from being intentional losers because it’s terrible for the sport.

I’d be fine with either plan you referenced. Problem though with the Silver version is that it’s going to be too difficult for mouth-breathers to comprehend.
 

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