Merits of abolishing the NHL draft
Onus on player evaluation: With cap system in place, no risk elite teams would hoard best talent
The NHL Draft begins on Friday. Let’s kill the NHL Draft. Admittedly, it is probably too late to do so this year. There are rooms rented in suburban Miami with non-refundable deposits, and flights booked and probably even excess baggage fees already paid. The free-agency period opens on July 1 and 30 NHL front offices would still be trying to get airline charges reversed.
But, for down the road: Why even have the draft at all? The strangest hockey game of this past season was the late March clash at the First Niagara Center between the Buffalo Sabres and the Arizona Coyotes. Buffalo lost (won) the game in overtime, and the local fans cheered enthusiastically, secure in the knowledge that the Sabres had moved a key step closer to clinching the coveted 30th place in the league, and a guarantee they would draft no worse than second. They will indeed be doing that Friday night, making potential superstar Jack Eichel a Sabre.
The mood in the arena that March night was deeply weird: home fans cheering the visitors, other fans booing them, the Sabres visibly annoyed that it had come to this.
But it came to that because the NHL, as do all North American sports leagues, rewards losing in the form of higher picks in the entry draft. Lotteries reduce the incentive to lose somewhat, and the NHL is juggling its lottery again to reduce it even more, but the incentive remains. Once a team has established that it has no shot at winning in a given season, the correct move is to bottom out and improve the team’s odds for a high draft pick.
No amount of lottery jiggerypokery could ever wholly eliminate the losing-is-good strategy, provided bad teams still have better chances at top picks than do good ones. And, moving to a far more randomized draft lottery order, as the NBA came close to doing during this past season, would cure the tanking syndrome but introduce all kinds of inequities. Certain franchises could end up with a decade’s worth of bad lottery breaks and be competitively buried in the process.
Defenders of the traditional draft order note that it preserves fairness, allowing poor teams the chance to rebuild with obvious young talent that is not available to the league’s powers. But, you want fairness? Wipe the thing out entirely. With the NHL’s salary cap linked to revenues already in place, there would be no risk that big-money teams would snap up all the top talent and leave small-market teams to fight over a bunch of pluggers — the imbalance often on display in international soccer, where all but a small number of powerhouses are aware that if any of their players eventually become really good, they will also be almost certain to leave.
No, the fascinating thing about a draft-less NHL would be how much it would force teams to reconsider player values. Someone in his early 20s is highly valuable to a team precisely because his contract is within CBA-defined affordable limits. But what if those limits didn’t exist? Tampa Bay has had seven years of Steven Stamkos at below market value because their 200708 mediocrity was rewarded with a 2008 first overall draft pick and the cap-friendly contract that the CBA dictates for a player’s early years. Would some other team have offered to pay him superstar money with his first contract as an 18-year-old?
The more relevant question now is for Connor McDavid: As of Friday, Edmonton gets him for seven years on the cheap. But how many teams would offer him, today, the eight-year, $84-million contract that the Chicago Blackhawks gave to each of Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane last summer? The answer, one suspects, is a lot.
Few prospects are as sure a bet as Stamkos and McDavid, though. How many teams would be willing to commit even a few million dollars annually to players not yet out of junior or the NCAA? Such a system would put tremendous scrutiny on scouting and player-development operations, since major investments in young talent would have obvious dire consequences if a team made a big bet on the wrong young guy.
You could see a scenario whereby teams all sign teenagers to long-term deals in the early days of a no-draft NHL, and after several franchises are burned by players who don’t pan out, a recalibration takes place where youth, and the uncertainty it brings, becomes too risky for a major commitment, except in McDavid-like circumstances.
How much cap space could a team realistically hope to devote to players not ready for an NHL roster? Would it be possible to have great NHL talent and soon-to-be-ready talent stashed in the minors, or would a team have to pick one or the other? Good questions. Ultimately, the system would reward teams that evaluate talent well, and punish those that do not.
That sounds fair.