The NHL’s Entry Draft Lottery plan makes no sense

The New York Rangers have a better picture of their prospects for the NHL Entry Draft lottery

When Gary Bettman and the NHL laid out their long term plans for returning to NHL hockey, they finally cleared up one of the major questions facing the league, how they will conduct the 2020 NHL Entry Draft Lottery.

The result is a convoluted process that will take one or two phases and will happen on one set date and another undetermined date in the future. . They didn’t answer the key questions about when the actual draft will be held and how the order picks will be determined.

The New York Rangers own two first round draft picks and there is now some clarity on how those picks will end up where they are.   The simple answer is that the Rangers could end up with either one or no lottery picks.

The whole process is incredibly confusing with as many as two separate lottery drawings from two different pools of teams and there seems to be few logical reasons to do it this way.

The format

Pre-pandemic, the draft lottery was a straightforward process.  The 15 teams that didn’t make the postseason were in the lottery with the worst teams having the best odds.  There’s no reason that the league couldn’t do it the same way despite the delay in getting the season re-started.

Instead, the draft lottery will have two phases.  Phase One will take place on June 26, the original date of the Entry Draft.  The seven non-postseason teams will be in it along with “placeholders” for the eight teams that will be eliminated in the play-in or “qualifying round.”

Instead of a series of drawings eliminating teams and leaving three teams with the top three picks, there will be three drawings, one each for the first, second and third pick.  Why three drawings?  No answer to that question.

Here’s where it gets complicated and just plain weird.

If the bottom seven teams get the top three picks (in the three drawings) there will be no Phase Two.  The top three picks will go to the winners and the remaining top 15 picks will go to the remaining bottom four teams and the losers of the qualifying round  in reverse order by points percentage.

If any of the top three picks go to a qualifying round loser, there will be another series of drawings, but the seven non-postseason teams won’t participate.

That means that if a team loses in the qualifying round they will have the same odds at getting the lottery pick as the other losing teams.

Here’s a scenario.  In Phase One, none of the worst seven teams get any of the three lottery picks.  That means a Phase Two with three drawings, only for the eight teams that lost in the qualifying round.  Each of those eight teams would have an even chance of getting the lottery pick, a 12.5% shot.

So, drawing one would be for the top overall pick.  The second draw would be among the remaining seven qualifying round losers and would be for the second pick (14.3%).  The third drawing would be for third lottery pick and would be among six teams (16.7%).

In this case, if the Rangers lose to Carolina in the qualifying round, they would have a 12.5% shot at Alexis Lafreniere, the consensus top pick.  If they lost in that drawing, they would have a 14.3% chance at the second overall pick and if they lost in that drawing, a 16.7% shot at the third overall pick.

Considering that the Rangers have the 12th worst points percentage among the teams that wouldn’t have qualified for the postseason, their odds of a top three pick would have been between 2% and 2.4%.

What it means is that if  none of the worst seven teams get any of the top three picks, as unlikely as that may seem, teams in the qualifying round would know that a loss would give them an equal chance of getting one of the top three players in the draft.

You can read the full lottery draft process description by clicking here.