League unlikely to roll dice on change to draft lottery
No matter what happens with the season, selection format expected to stay the same
At some point or another, the show must go on for the NHL.
Like everybody else, the teams’ management, coaching staff and players have to be patient and wait for the day it becomes safe to resume a normal lifestyle without concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus.
While the NHL is hopeful it can complete the regular season when it gets clearance for teams to resume playing, the reality gets lower with each passing day. At this point, it’s going to be midmay before there’s even a possibility of that happening and even the likes of all-star Sidney Crosby have suggested with a pause in the schedule, it may be best to go straight to the post-season if play does resume.
The decision to postpone the NHL Draft scheduled for June 26-27 at the Bell Centre in Montreal didn’t come as a surprise because the league either expects to be playing hockey at that point or is still unable to have large crowds in a rink because the American Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Health Canada haven’t given the green light to hold large gatherings.
There has been idle chatter that if the league does decide to cancel the rest of the regular season and go to the playoffs, that the format of the draft lottery may change. A check with a handful of league executives in the last couple of days indicates they don’t expect that to be the case and the teams with the best odds in the lottery will retain those numbers whenever the league loads the balls into the machine.
Of course, fans of the Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens are waiting with bated breath to see what the format will be if the league decides to have a 24-team tournament to determine the final playoff spots and cancels the remainder of the regular season. At this point, both teams would be in the lottery and have major interest in knowing how the league is going to figure this all out.
Rimouski Oceanic winger Alexis Lafreniere is the consensus No. 1 overall pick and the top prize for the lottery, which was scheduled for April 9 at 8 p.m. at the NHL Network studios in Secaucus, N.J. But that will have to be changed because the league hasn’t even determined if it will finish the regular season or return with the playoffs — or if either happens at all.
“I don’t see any reason to change the format and I’m not sure it would even be given any consideration,” a league executive told Postmedia this week.
“If they go straight to the playoffs, a good portion of the season has already been played and those teams at the bottom weren’t really going to gain much ground if the league hadn’t gone on pause.”
The sentiment from league executives I’ve spoken with is that just because the season may end up being shortened, it doesn’t mean you can arbitrarily just change the rules. The Senators, for example, had 11 games left to play before the NHL went into shutdown mode on March 12 and were getting ready to close out the regular season against the Pittsburgh Penguins on April 4 at Canadian Tire Centre.
If the lottery was held today, the Detroit Red Wings, ranked No. 31 overall, would have the best odds of winning the No. 1 overall pick at 18.5 per cent and would be followed by the No. 30-ranked Senators at 13.5 per cent. But Ottawa actually has a combined 25 per cent chance of winning the lottery because they also hold the San Jose Sharks’ top pick, which they obtained in the Erik Karlsson trade in September 2018, and their odds are 11.5 per cent.
The Los Angeles Kings are at 9.5 per cent, while the Habs currently have the eighth-best odds at six per cent.
Quinton Byfield of the Sudbury Wolves is considered another top-five option for the teams that don’t land a shot at Lafreniere.
Those teams in the lottery would battle any potential change because the current rules were put in place a long time ago and it would be nonsensical to start trying to come up with a different idea just because a small portion of the schedule didn’t get played — even though it’s true these are unique circumstances.
One executive cautioned there may have to be small modifications to the lottery because not everybody involved has played the same amount of games. The Wings and Senators have both played 71 games, while the Kings have 12 left to play. One possibility is to go with winning percentage instead of points, but that wouldn’t really change a whole lot as far as the format goes.
The draft hasn’t been rescheduled but when it is, the expectation is it will either be a scaleddown version at a Montreal hotel ballroom, like it was done at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa in 2005 coming out of the 200405 lockout season. It’s also a possibility that the draft could be done online through virtual connections.
“They’re going to have to do something for television,” another executive added. “It’s a pretty big event.”