Finishing last has its perils
With new NHL draft lottery system, odds are tricky to land the No. 1 pick
If you asked an average fan of a Canadian NHL team for their opinion on fate, I would imagine the response would be that they don’t much care for it, thanks.
Fate does not seem to have been too kind to our hometown teams, that is.
That’s bound to be the perception when the Stanley Cup droughts in this country range from very long to embarrassingly long to the existential question of whether it can truly be called a drought if the team has never won a Cup. Doesn’t a drought need a starting point?
But as this slog of an NHL season winds down, with gloom settling in various degrees over every Canadian team except perhaps, improbably, the Toronto Maple Leafs, it is time to make peace with fate, because good fortune is all you have left to root for, in the form of the draft lottery. But it is their sad luck that being a bad team has never been less advantageous.
There’s been some form of a draft lottery in place since 1995, but this is the first that seems designed to be particularly agonizing. Until 2012, teams could only move up a maximum of four spots in the draft ranking, so the last-place team could only be jumped by those four spots below it, and even still the basement team would pick no worse than second.
Then the rules were changed to allow all teams in the lottery a shot at the top pick, but again the last-place team could do no worse than pick number two.
This year, though, the April 30 draft lottery is actually three separate lotteries to select the teams picking first, second and third. So the last-place team this season could end up picking fourth if it doesn’t manage to have the balls fall its way in any of the lotteries.
There will be a domino effect on the other teams, too, so depending on who wins which lottery, a team like the Calgary Flames, currently fifth-worst in the league standings, could drop all the way to eighth if three teams above them in the points race win each of the draws.
Even in a deep draft year, plunking all the way down to eighth or ninth is going to dra- matically weaken the chances of selecting a franchise-altering player.
The math doesn’t do the really bad teams any favours, either. The last-place team, presently the Maple Leafs, will have a 20 per cent chance of winning the first lottery. Those are lousy odds, unless you have the recent luck of the Edmonton Oilers. Ask the Buffalo Sabres, who had a 20 per cent shot at the first pick last year, and watched it go to the Oilers.
The odds and percentages have shuffled over time, but if the lottery has been consistent in one way since its inception, it’s that it has been pretty good picking a winner other than the worst overall team: only six times in 20 years has the worst team won the lottery.
And if, in the new system, the last-place team doesn’t win that first lottery, it doesn’t get a significant bump in the subsequent lotteries.
Again using the Leafs as an example for the last-place team, the Leafs would have about a 21 per cent chance of winning the second lottery, and a 23 per cent chance of winning the third lottery. So, it’s more likely that the basement team will pick fourth than it is that they will win one of the lotteries and land in the top three.
To get a sense of how this would work in practice, you can use one of the draft lottery simulators that various industrious people have developed to kill time on the Internet. I used the NHL Lottery Simulator, and ran it 10 times. That’s meaningless in a statistically reliable sense, but it gives a picture of the randomness of the thing: The Oilers won twice, as did the Columbus Blue Jackets, with the remaining six first overall picks going to Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Arizona, Winnipeg and New Jersey. Three of those teams — the Coyotes, Senators and Devils — have odds of 5 per cent or worse at the top pick, and yet they won it. Toronto didn’t win it once. Maple Leafs fans would not be surprised at that outcome.
It makes more sense from a franchise-building perspective to have as many balls as possible in the lottery. But since the odds are so evenly distributed among the non-playoff teams, there’s no point in gnashing teeth over finishing 29th instead of 30th.
Gary Bettman insisted the other week that teams in his NHL “don’t tank.” If that’s the case, then, why institute a lottery system that is so clearly designed to prevent it?