New York Rangers: The loser point and the difference this season

For the 20th time this season, the New York Rangers went to overtime, last night it was against the Edmonton Oilers. New York has lost in extra time or the shootout 13 times, those 13 points are the difference between the second and seventh overall pick.

When it comes to issues about the structure of the NHL, the list is long and tedious for things as small as offsides review to as major as the playoff format making absolutely zero sense. Amongst these issues ranks the loser point that a team is awarded for losing in overtime after making it through 60 minutes of regulation.

With the most overtime or shootout losses of any NHL team this year, the New York Rangers are the perfect case study into the lack of logic in the current point system. Originally, the shootout was added following the 2004 lockout-canceled season as a way to not have ties and give an exciting conclusion.

However, more than 14 years later, this format is both stale and fails to accomplish its goal. The shootout ending a game is as illogical as ending a baseball game with a home run derby. Sure, the skills from the regular game are still necessary, but it’s not a satisfying or true conclusion.

The league will likely never adopt Columbus Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella’s 3 on 3 format “until someone dies.” Yet, the current’s format of rewarding both teams for being tied after sixty minutes changes the way coaches run their bench and it discourages either side from taking a risk to try and win.

The lottery system

Specifically, New York is dealing with a case of the team being greater than the sum of its parts. At face value, the Rangers are one of the least talented rosters in the entire league. Including goals from players already traded, the blue shirts have 192 goals on the season, the 21st most in the entire league.

Even so, head coach David Quinn has this group playing as hard as possible and it’s yielded results. The little differences on effort every play are what keeps this lineup in games even though it’s not particularly good. So, in those final ten minutes of a tie game, it can certainly play conservatively enough to make it to overtime with not too much stress.

But, once the Rangers make it to overtime, the lack of talent is just far too much of an issue. Take Monday night’s game against the Oilers in which the tandem of Conor McDavid and Leon Draisatil were able to impose their will on the ice.

The punitive lottery system rewards teams for losing and still doesn’t even give the team a guaranteed selection. The randomness of ping pong balls is supposed to discourage tanking and make teams try on a night to night basis.

Instead, it encourages teams to throw away entire seasons and field appallingly bad rosters that no one in their right mind would pay to see. Instead of randomness in the ping pong balls, there needs to be an added weight for the number of consecutive seasons that a team finishes in the bottom ten of the league.

The Oilers winning four lotteries this decade is patently absurd and it never made the team better.  Instead, chronic mismanagement incentivized the team to lose and keep racking up cheap young talent under the guise of rebuilding.

The fix

There are a handful of ways to better award points for victory and draft picks. When it comes to points, the straightforward, three points for regulation win, two for an overtime win and one for overtime loss could work. On the other hand, it could opt for the easier, a loss gets no points regardless of if it’s after 60 minutes or 65.

Fixing the draft is a far more tedious process because the rules are set up to favor the small market teams. The league is more inclined to protect these teams with favorable rules because they are needed to keep the entire operation going forward.

Even if the players are dramatically underpaid, they have limited mobility and can’t be free agents until 27, the lottery hurts these teams even more. When a team wants to capture a top pick, it requires bottoming out and putting a ghastly lineup on the ice. These large scale tanking efforts are difficult to ever get out of and it’s why there needs to be an overhaul of league rules.

First, a team should not be able to win the lottery more than once in a certain number of years. The Oilers winning four times is patently absurd and it shows a lack of effort from management to meaningfully improve the roster around the draft picks. Accumulating cheap talent is a key part of rebuilding, but never improving is detrimental to organizational health.

Whether it means giving every team that misses the playoffs an equal chance of landing the top pick, penalizing those teams that don’t improve or completely getting rid of a draft all together are all methods to improve the current format.

The Rangers perspective

There’s no way around it, the Rangers are being held back by this system for rebuilding the right way. Instead of trading away all notable talent and accepting its fate as a lottery team, Quinn and the roster have played their hearts off and made strides this year. Even after trading away Kevin Hayes and Mats Zuccarello, the compete level is still there.

By giving their fanbase something to root for, a young and exciting team, instead of replicating the plan up in Ottawa, the Rangers are actively being penalized. The overtime losses are just part of the equation. There needs to be some weight given to the context around the organization to accurately reflect the need that the draft is supposed to address.

Getting rid of the draft is never going to happen unfortunately because it favors the good teams, but it would fix this very issue. Instead of teams struggling in hopes of winning a random drawing, it’d encourage them to always try to improve.

That’s ultimately what the goal should be as a league, have its franchises constantly try and improve. If the system forces them to be bad to acquire better talent, maybe it’s time for a facelift.

Going forward, the league really needs to consider encouraging competitive behavior from its teams.