Steve Yzerman upset the Rangers won the draft lottery? Boo hoo, poor Steve

There is a movement to revise the draft lottery won by the New York Rangers

There are apparently a few hockey people upset that the New York Rangers won the 2020 lottery. Why? Besides an apparent hatred for New York,some hockey executives think that a heavily weighted system is not weighted enough.   Steve Yzerman of the Red Wings is leading the charge.

Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet reported the following after the NHL general managers call last Friday.  “A good chunk of the two-hour discussion was spent on the draft lottery. There are calls to change the format, to increase the odds for teams that finish lowest. While there’s a recognition this was a unique year and not the norm, Detroit was incredibly upset with dropping to fourth after a season where it was clear the Red Wings were not tanking.”

The NHL draft lottery system was established after the Pittsburgh Penguins tanked in order to be able to draft Mario Lemieux.  In one of tho most shameful episodes in NHL history, the Pens actually demoted good players to the minor leagues in order to lose and draft Super Mario.

Despite the protestations, the system appears to be working.  First, some more history.

Lottery history

Th league initiated the lottery in 1995, over ten years after the Lemieux fiasco. In its original version, all non-playoff teams were in the lottery, but the most you could move up was four slots.  That meant that a bottom five team was guaranteed the top pick.  That lasted until 2012, when the NHL changed the rules. You still couldn’t move up more than four slots, but only non-playoff teams were in a weighted lottery and there was only one winner.  In 2016, the NHL adopted the current system, assigning the top three picks on a weighted system among the non-playoff teams.

In 25 years of the lottery, the worst team in the league as retained the pick 11 times.  the second worst team go the top pick three times and the third place team got the #1 pick four times.  So, 18 out of 25 years one of the three worst teams in the league got the top pick.

Due to the early version of the draft when a team could only move up four slots, the fact is that in the first 24 years of the lottery, only three times has a team out of the bottom three gotten the top pick.  Those teams were the 2000 New York Islanders (Rick DiPietro),  the 2007 Chicago Blackhawks (Patrick Kane)  and the 2017 New Jersey Devils (Nico Hischier).

The fact that the Rangers had the 14th worst record and were able to win the lottery was a combination of luck and the coronavirus altering the format.

Now, the fact that the Rangers moved into second place in 2019 and won the lottery in 2020 has raised the hackles of some NHL executives, but let’s just say, tough.

The Red Wings stink

The 2019-20 Detroit Red Wings were awful.  The won only 17 games and finished with 39 points.  The Devils won the second fewest games, only 28 but still 11 more than the Red Wings.  The second worst team by points was Ottawa with 62.

So, before we give Detroit a pat on the back for not tanking, think about this. They were so bad they didn’ t have to. Let’s put it this way.  If the Wings had won the last 11 games of an 82 game season, they still would have finished last.

There’s no doubt that Steve Yzerman was upset over the results.  Perhaps he should look at his own organization before taking potshots at a system that is actually working.  Looking at their draft history, it  is pretty lousy

In 2018 they grabbed Filip Zadina with the sixth pick.  They could have had Quinn Hughes who went to Vancouver seventh overall. In 2017 they took Michael Rasumussen ninth overall, passing on Filip Chytil and Robert Thomas. In 2016 they picked Dennis Cholowski 20th overall when they could have had Alex DeBrincat, Samuel Girard or Victor Mete.  In 2015 they took Evgeny Svechnikov, who has a 20 game NHL resume, with the 19th overall pick.  Brock Boeser, Travis Konecny and Anthony Beauvillier were all selected after Svechnikov and within nine slots.

They did well with Dylan Larkin at 14th overall in 2014 though David Pastrnak and Brayden Point went later.  The simple fact is that they haven’t drafted well since they picked Larkin and that is one big reason that they are awful.

Don’t change it

Steve Yzerman is one of the most respected hockey executives and a dominant voice in the league, but in this case it’s just sour grapes.  They are making a lot of the fact that the 14th worst team won the lottery, but that’s not what happened. The top pick went to a team that entered the first phase of the draft lottery with odds of winning that ranged from one to six percent.  It turns out the 12th worst team with only  a 2.5% chance of getting the top pick won.

Of course the odds immediately jumped to 12.5% for the eight team that lost in the qualifying round.  So, for the Rangers to get the top pick they had to get lucky twice.  The first time when they beat the 2.5% odds to get the top pick and then beat the 12.5% odds to best seven other teams to the prize.

The whole two round lottery format was only because of the pandemic and the NHL has to recognize that.  They  could have avoided all of the controversy by just waiting for the qualifying round to end before making conducting the draft in one round as usual.  If the order of drawing remained the same, Detroit would have dropped to fourth, Yzerman still would have been upset and it would have been Nashville who won the Alexis Lafrenière sweepstakes.

So, Steve Yzerman should just go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make his team better without complaining about a system that failed his team once.  And Ranger fans should go light a candle to the hockey gods for smiling down on them once in a lifetime (actually twice including 2019).