NHL Draft: How to fix the broken draft lottery system

The NHL Draft lottery system must undergo a huge overhaul to accomplish its purpose

There are many broken things about the NHL Draft. The very idea of a draft is a bit asinine. In what other professions would it be acceptable to tell someone where they’re going to have to work? But what’s even more broken is the lottery system.

The draft lottery is supposed to ensure the worst teams get the best picks. In theory, it helps teams rebuild. Except, well, it doesn’t always do that. Why? Because the worst teams compete to see who can be the worst team and get the best chances of winning the first pick.

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For fans, this is frustrating. It completely kills the product. And who wants to spend money to watch a team who would be better off losing than winning? This is an enigma the NHL has tried to solve but hasn’t been able to.

I’m here to offer a proposal that would give the league, its teams, and their fans what they want. The league and fans would get more competitive games. Meanwhile, the worst teams would still get the best chance to get high draft picks. You might know this as the Gold Drafting method.

Good as Gold

The Gold Drafting proposal is hardly new. It was first proposed by Adam Gold at the 2012 Sloan Analytics Conference. Currently, the NHL uses raw point totals to determine a team’s lottery chances. The Gold method scraps the lottery completely.

Instead of using raw point totals over 82 games, it uses points since a team has been eliminated. If this sounds familiar, Shane Doan endorsed it back in 2016. It’s been floated around as a possibility, especially by those who are analytically gifted.

This encourages teams out of the playoff hunt to continue to try to win games. Everybody likes a good product and the Gold method does a great job of ensuring that good product. At the end of the year, the draft order is determined strictly by how many gold points a team has. Here’s a look at how the 2017 draft order would have looked using the Gold plan. In case you’re curious, as of March 15, only the Arizona Coyotes and Vancouver Canucks have been eliminated.

There are some concerns with this method. Would it have a negative impact on parity? Wouldn’t it just make teams tank sooner? Doesn’t it punish overly weak teams? Data Visualization expert Micah Blake McCurdy (@IneffectiveMath on Twitter) addressed them at the 2016 Rochester Institute of Technology Hockey Analytics Conference. You can check out his presentation here.

Now, the Gold method isn’t perfect. There is one flaw with it – it lacks drama. Something about waiting to see which ping pong balls come up is fun and exciting. But it’s also unfair to determine who gets a draft pick by such a random method.

Next: 2018 NHL Mock Draft Version 2.0

The Gold method ensures the team that gets the first overall pick will both need it (they most likely got eliminated early) and earned it (they didn’t just phone it in after being eliminated). It provides a realistic way for everybody to get what they want out of the draft and the regular season.

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