@@generaldoof7334players want to win of course and give it their all on the ice, yet as much as they want to win, it becomes impossible when teams’ front offices will assemble rosters specifically to not win.
Thats 100% true. No player wants to play like shit. You can see the "tank" mindset with management by trading quality players for draft picks, aswell as calling up prospects to play while simultaneously making their current team worse. I can't fathom a player whose dream its been to play in the NHL and win a cup purposely play bad in hopes they get a high pick.
I love the way that Dallas has built their team with Heiskanen being the only high pick in in the draft. Just crushing it with their late 1sts and 2nd rounders in the last several years.
And the Stars definitely didn't tank to get Miro Heiskanen, considering they won the Central Division in 2016 and made it all the way to Game 7 of Round 2 before suffering severe regression and finishing well out of a playoff spot, only to get rewarded with the ping pong balls.
Mavrik Bourque just won AHL player of the year too and is on the way. They're going to have to break up that team it's not fair to rest of the league lol.
And they didn’t even tank to get him, they just got insanely lucky and moved up. Dallas, St. Louis, NYR are all so good at drafting. Washington used to be, but they haven’t had a hit in a while.
Great video, though I do disagree with the idea that all tanking is inherently bad. The NHL is a business and the decision to trade good players to reset the timeline and be in contention for elite talent is simply asset management. As a fan, I'd much rather watch a handful of bad years and become excited for the draft and free agency rather than watch my team spin their tires for a decade and never get over the hump. Even 3 or 4 top picks doesn't guarantee wins, you need competent ownership, management, and leadership to win. If we're arguing the "integrity of the sport", I think the NHL gets it right the most of any other major sport in NA. The NFL doesn't have a draft lottery at all, the MLB only has a 6-team lottery, and the NBA is a superstar league where one player can transform a team.
I agree, trading good players to contenders for extra draft picks is a sacrifice for the future and I am fine with that being rewarded. Buffalo and Ottawa show that there are risks to team morale and culture if you take it too far and try to tank for an extended period of time, teams that empty the cupboards too hard get so bad that they get a culture of losing and can't aquire players for years. But if they do it wisely they collect heaps of young players that learn and develop together with maybe a couple older mentors left from previous years while others were moved to contenders. This process also gets a lot of the best players to playoff teams which makes the playoffs even deeper with high end talent. if all the teams were keeping their ageing talent to win 36 games insteasd of 32 that would kind of feel like a wsate
The Sharks did not tank. They were contenders for about two decades and did their best to keep the team competitive years past their prime (already past it the year they went to the SCF). They've had a lot of injuries and traded bad contracts and players who no longer wished to be part of the team. It was a much deserved lottery win.
On paper, I agree. But with context of how often the Sharks egregiously choked in the playoffs; They don’t deserve shit, Because who’s to say ,that they won’t waste that draft pick’s career on playoff ineptitude, as well?
Agreed, they spent a lot of money in the 2010s on expensive older players since they had a better chance on a good playoff run, so hopefully a rebuild with a young roster will pan out in the next few years
In the proposed bottom 16 playoffs, would the players have any motivation to try and get a player who might replace them? Is a bottom 6 guy on the 19th place team going to put any effort in to help a team he’s not personally invested in? Players would 100% rather get the time off, and this proposed system had the danger of trapping a team in last forever. Few teams will win the cup, but top prospects can make a team a contender (ex: Vancouver) which is good for the fans.
I always had this idea that the draft order or the lottery odds should be based on the combined records from previous three seasons. That way tanking would not be possible unless it's your long-term plan, and the team rewarded with the first overall pick would always be the worst in the League.
The problem is that it would punish being a middle of the road team that might get into the playoffs as a 6, 7, 8 seed. The reality of the league would be that a middle of the road year is a gigantic waste as it harms your next three drafts (vs tanking) and it has a very low likelihood of resulting in a cup (vs being an obvious contender). So the correct strategic decision for front offices would be to either be in a complete tanking state or be in a contending state which would be so rare that you could easily have 5-10 teams trying to be as garbage as possible because the value of increased odds/better draft order is far more worthwhile considering you have to plan to rebuild across a minimum of three years of basement dwelling.
One thing lost on a lot of people was that the Oilers got Hall after being the most injured team in the previous season with 530 man-games lost to injury compared to 200-300 for the next closest team. It looked like a decision made late in the season for them.
Pardon this simple country hockey fan, but I do have a few vexing questions I hope someone more learned than I might shed some light on. What's the difference between tanking, just being bad, or going through a proper rebuild and making smart hockey decisions towards building for the future? It seems to me that it's way too easy to just pigeonhole any team that finishes in last place in a year as being tankers, but someone is always going to finish last whether they're a tanker or not. How do bad teams improve without building through the draft? Free agents have to want to come play for a team, and with a hard salary cap in place you can't just keep writing more zeroes on the check until you've got a championship roster. Game breaking talent almost never hits the market, teams lock them up for the best part of their career. It's nearly impossible for a bottom place team to trade for top talent, elite players all have NTCs and NMCs.
tanking is pretty much when management fields a team that will give them the best chance to lose, but yeah it’s hard to distinguish tanking from rebuilding
The Wild are one of the in-between teams, a team that (due to cap hell because of the buyouts) are inbetween a first round exit and missing the playoffs, despite a lot of tallent on the roster With a 1st overall pick tournament, teams in the in-between would stand a much better chance of rising out of purgatory with elite young tallent that would have the environment for them to grow and prosper with less chance of busting Bias speaking from being a Wild fan, but its a great idea
Having a tournament at the end of the season to determine who gets 1st overall is a VERY BAD idea. If I was a player on a losing team, why would I compete in order to get a player that would replace me? Also what about players who are upcoming free agents? Why would they want to help a team that they won't be on next season?
Im from Buffalo. The running bet is whom between the 2 oldest NHL teams to have never won a Cup, Sabres and Canucks, will win the Cup first. This year, 2024, Vancouver is still in the running. Good grief!
Fantastic argument against tanking can be found with the Senators and Lightning who showed it matters a whole hell of a lot more if you draft smart and have a good scouting department
23:17 There's actually a little more to this - plenty of teams who weren't contenders in 2004 sold a lot of their best players not (solely) because they were tanking, but also because it was widely accepted that whenever the new CBA would be implemented, a salary cap would be as well. Jagr was the highest-paid player in 2004 ($11M), and the four you mentioned commanded a combined payroll of $24.1M, which is over 60% of what would be the $39M cap. So it made sense to get returns on elite players when they might hamstring your franchise otherwise. Great video, you definitely deserve more subs! :)
Last season, I was at the last ANA Ducks game chanting "We want Bedard !", wanting to lose to ensure last spot in the NHL and highest #1 draft odds; this also only occurred because CHI Blackhawks got points in their last 2 games, so you could say Ducks tanked better at the end than the Blackhawks... But we all know what happens next, CHI moves up in the draft and gets Bedard and ANA falls to 2nd. CHI gets another generational talent 1st pick and Ducks still don't have a 1st. Would have been nice if ANA went UP this year but no justice. Will never be able to see Bedard the same after this.
i feel your pain, as a jackets fan it was a very similar situation. i was at the home finale and was pissed we beat the pens because it put us #2, and you guys moved up to #1 in the odds. and of course they leaked columbus fell to #3 before they were supposed to announce it, that was pretty upsetting too
What a fucking great video. It's a shame the views don't reflect that. Your idea of a Draft pick playoff bracket sounds amazing. Please don't be discouraged by this videos lack of views, you are one of the only hockey youtubers that makes actually well researched, well produced videos about interesting topics. Not just clickbaity, game-reviewy bullshit like every other hockey youtuber.
I don't see how players will be motivated to play in a draft pick playoff though. If they play well, their employer gets the benefit of a high pick while they essentially just get nothing. I don't even think a bonus for the whole team if they win will be enough to truly motivate them. Also, teams that traded away their first overall pick and still didn't make the playoffs will still try to tank in this format.
Cool video! Tanking definitely can work for some teams some times, but it's not the cure-all that some fans really seem to think it is, especially for hockey. There's a quote from an NBA exec that IIRC says "you either want to be at the very top or at the very bottom, not in between," but basketball isn't hockey. One player can't change the entire fortunes of your franchise It gets annoying having to tell my fellow Isles fans this. What the sabres are now, the Islanders used to be. They sucked in the 90s, got rid of a lot of prospects to try to "win now" in the early 2000s (while never winning a playoff series), sucked again, and are now in a period of somewhat sustained success (playoffs in last 5 of 6 years, 2 ECF trips), ironically enough, right after our 1OA left in free agency. Tanking is not a guaranteed ticket to a cup, a lot of time it's just a lot of losing and watching bad hockey, which I sure as hell don't want to do
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said, especially the part about being appalled at the prospect of watching my favorite team egregiously lose, just for a mere chance of obtaining a generational talent..
Very well done video. Loved discussing all the built in problems with the draft system like how trading away everything you have for a few teenagers does may always mean success. I understand where you are coming from with the addition of a tournament to win the first overall pick and think that a bottom 8 bracket would be awesome since no other leagues do this. At the end of the day people need to understand that the front office is what puts together these winners. You compare Buffalo to the new regime in Chicago it’s night and day.
The current format is actually pretty good. And I say this as a Wings fan having the worst draft lottery luck in a decade. Relegation would be the most pure, honest form of competition, but in today’s corporate culture in sports, it’ll never happen. Maybe one change is how the percentages are weighted. That could be tweaked. But if you take a step back and look at it overall, a 32 team league is going to have teams who just downright suck. And others who tend to win more. The draft lottery system has worked really well. Vast majority of teams, despite such a large league, can hang their hat on some level of success, a cup, finals a deep run, or hope for future. That’s a huge accomplishment. That’s all thanks to Bettman. (I’ll never understand why so many fans hate him). It’s probably Canadian fans since he’s American. Anyone who knows anything about business will tell you that Bettman has been nothing short of incredible in the job he’s done.
Good video but it isn't that simple. Tanking is more involved than just getting a high draft pick. It has interplay with the cap, drafting, development, injury luck, ect. Here are some of the key things you can't skip over in this discussion. 1st of all you didn't even touch on the reason why the draft exists. The purpose is to maintain parity. The worst teams getting the best players. Anything that disrupts that relationship defeats the purpose. 2nd Drafting isn't the be all end all because drafting is an imperfect skill. You are going to be better or worse at it depending on personnel and even then you're still trying to predict the future. You can't predict injuries or development outcomes. 3rd You have to factor in the cap advantages of ELC's it's a huge reason why having good young players is so valuable. It's the only class of player that is not paid what they are worth. (or more realistically more than what they are worth because of free agent bidding wars).
The guy doesn't have to explain literally everything about drafting. You can use a bit of common sense to assume psychics aren't doing the drafting and cheap contracts are good in a salary cup league lol
Outstanding analysis. Made me wonder though... How many teams have, or had, first round draft picks? If most teams have a top pick on their roster that would make winning with a top pick even less of a guarantee. Also, some first rounds like Crosby and McDavid came in and were immediately committed to the team, becoming great leaders. Was Daigle? I don't remember it that way.
The Ducks were one of the best teams in the western conference from 2013 to 2018. At the end, the ducks had a extremely old core of Perry, Getzlaf, Kesler, Bieksa, Beauchemin, and Vermette. The cost of going all out at the end is the complete collapse of the core and the Ducks have been trying to pick up the pieces since. Sometimes tanking is less deliberate and more of a guarantee when you pay everything for one last run. I imagine this will be the exact fate of the Bruins and Penguins in the coming years.
I thought the "Drag the franchise out to relevance" was uncalled for. Capitals have had a large and devoted fanbase for almost 20 years. At what point are you allowed to be a real boy?
Two of your videos watched. Both are well thought out, well researched, great explanations with excellent graphics and timely highlights and strong musical choices. Subscribed. I will watch them all.
as a fan of the blue jackets who've been doing mostly tanking for their entire existence with our best team getting eliminated in the second round... Tanking sucks I do kind of like the idea of a bottom 8 draft tournament
Coming from somewhere whose only recently getting into hockey, but still knows a little bit about the sport’s history, due to watching urinatingtree videos and absolutely despises the premise of tanking; I would absolutely love a postseason for the 1st round pick!
In the intro, I was thinking “yes of course tanking works, how do you think Chicago got Bedard or Montreal got Slafkovsky?” Then when I saw the video of Nail Yakupov, I thought “oh crap that’s a good point” 💀
The Pens didn't tank to get Crosby or Fleury because at that time the Pens in fact were struggling at that time from 2002-2003 season until 2005-2006 season financially and as a team the Pens were almost bankrupt until Mario Lemieux saved them by getting a group of people including Lemieux himself purchasing stakes in the team. They almost moved and changed cities.
GREAT video! Create a REASON for teams NOT TO WANT TO LOSE. A N D at the same time a REASON for other teams to WANT TO WIN. (stick with me)... The bottom place NHL team gets sent to the AHL. The top team in the AHL gets promoted to the NHL. THERES YOUR REASON..in the AHL to want to win. It (I believe) works that way in European soccer.
I'm a Sharks fan, and I was against the current tank. You strip away the culture of the team, which makes fans less invested in the team. And in order to guarantee a bottom 3 finish, you have to absolutely gut your roster. Meier, Hertl, Burns and Karlsson had to all be traded. Couture was conveniently injured. Ppl were calling them a dying team as early as 2014, but they came back for two good cup runs, surpassing their prime which was around 2010, not just once but twice. At some point, most teams have to rebuild in some manner, but tanking where you deliberately off-load good players is not necessary and there's no guarantee that it all falls in place. Edmonton failed their first attempt because those 3 1st picks in a row weren't great. What they needed was a solid core and they got that by drafting McDavid, Draisaitl, Bouchard and Nurse. It was the same for all the other teams. Colorado too, had to do two rebuilds. The 2nd one is always a softer rebuild, which shows that it's not necessary to tank a team. Meanwhile you have a team like the Rangers who made a really quick rebuild and teams like Dallas and Carolina who never went for a true rebuild and have instead gradually built a really strong team through drafting and trades. I envy the fans of teams like that. San Jose in the 2010's was that kind of team actually, but it's not anymore.
I love the irony that the one team you use as the only team that won without a top 3 pick, owes it's entire existence on the spoils of a former #1 pick that refused to sign with them, and created the most ridiculously lopsided trade in order to get rid of that player. All of that, only to be picked up and moved to Colorado the very next year, just one year, and one key component shy of a Stanley Cup. Talk about a turnkey operation. Edit: Added this comment while only about halfway through the video. I'm glad to see that you added the Lindros issue near the end. In all, a very well researched, and put together piece. This definitely made me a subscriber. Thanks for putting in the hard work to do this.
I have a really bad team based on draft numbers. Wow, we must stink! the lousy low picks we've gotten include: Draft # #25 David Pastrnak # 63 David Krejci #56 Zdeno Chara #71 Brad Marchand #45 Patrice Bergeron #217 Our latest Stanley cup-winning goalie, Tim Thomas was drafted to the Nordics B's latest Vezina awarded goalie, Ullmark, was drafted #163 Yeah we got to start tanking to get some better players... 🐻
First, a lot of goalies go later because of how long it takes to develop them. Second, and more importantly, teams have to have really good scouts and development team to get players like that late in the draft. There is a reason people make a big deal if a player becomes a star and they were drafted after the 3rd round.
Sharks & Leafs fan here… it was so obvious Chicago tanked last year, the goalie threw a 🍕 up the middle then whiped out 😮 this year it was painful to lose by football scores to teams… if Logan doesn’t have a mystery injury all year he’s simply too good to make a complete tank, the team turned around for 5-10 games in mid-season when he came back, they had moxy/confidence so we could say “the future is bright” 🎉😊
I have thought so much about everything you said. Makes me more proud of the fact the Canucks have come as far as they have without tanking. Good drafting and signings and trades. Really hope we finish off the Oilers this round, otherwise it helps reinforce that all you really have to do is sit back, tank and get your McDavid's to win. It's a travesty Bedard went to the Blackhawks.
I mean from 2013 to 2019 we drafted six top ten picks in seven years. And many of those picks are our current core, so... Also the Oilers needed to basically blow three first overall picks before even they got a McDavid. Aside from a handful of sure-bit pre-draft bets, drafting is hard and you can never be sure if a player will make it or not.
Shockingly, it really depends WHO the top player in the draft is as to how “worth it” that it is to tank. The only two “good pieces” of championship teams from the 2010 draft have been Tarasenko and Carlson. Then in 2011 the best player was taken in the 2nd round, and as much as we love Nuge he was never going to be a #1 centre on a contending team. Then 2012 😑 yeah thanks for the first pick that year when none of the top 4 picks even play in the league anymore. I don’t think that I’m being biased when I say that those were three of arguably the worst three years to get the first pick in a ten year span, and the Oilers got them back to back to back. And then, even if you do get the first pick, and you do get “that guy”, you NEED to already have pieces in place to succeed. Penguins already had Letang, Fleury and Malkin before they got Crosby. Chicago already had Kieth, Seabrook and a few other guys before they got Kane and Toews. Oilers had NOTHING when they started picking first over all. Management still thought they were a finals team in 2009. Sure they got McDavid in 2015, but they needed Klefbom, Nurse, Draisaitl and Nuge ahead of him in order to compete. And even then they still needed one more pick in Bouchard to really round out the group. All this to say, we’ll go back in time and trade the Canucks 2/3 of our 1st over all picks from those three years for LITERALLY NOTHING, and both teams will be in the exact same place that they are now.
You missed the Flyers with the first overall pick thing, yes 75 they got to pick first via a trade, but if we are talking strictly natural first overall pick, the Flyers have never had that luxury.
The final proposal wil have stern resistance from the national teams and the IIHF (the International Ice Hockey Federation). The IIHF World Championship is usually held around the Second Round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. This allows players from already eliminated teams to suit up for their countries and fight for the gold. If the NHL introduce a similar tournament for the bottom 16 will result a much shallower talent pool from which national team coaches can pick. And for Canada and the United States especially they will have to resort to juniors, minor leaguers and whatever journeymen they find playing in Europe. These teams will be oblitterated by the European teams like Sweden, Finland or Czechia who can easilly fill the void with players from their domestic leagues. Russia also would've been at advantage as they can rely on the KHL'ers, but as we all know - they're banned from international competition. And the it's in IIHF's best interest to have NHL players participating in the World Championship's Elite division (the IIHF's World Championship is a bit different from other sports as it employs promotion and relegation system across their 5 divisions for 9 seperate tournaments).
I think the lesson is that top prospects are just one cog of a championship. Management, coaching, development, and all around team composition along with a bit of luck are just as important.
Love your content. Great video, but here are my strong opinions on tanking. Tanking sucks, it has always sucked. It's a low percentage play. For every team that makes off with a Lemieux, a Dozen teams end up with a replacement level player that they just wasted a whole fucking season on. The discussion would be different if you always got your guy, but most of the time you don't. Losing is Rot. When you look at the extremely successful sports franchises, the ones that are always competing for decades on end. They simply do not tank. They spend there lul year competing, and then the they power back up with Drafting, development, free agency, and Trading. Your an aging vet. Are you ever going to a team that has a history of tanking. One that might just fold one of your last seasons left. Are you ever waiving a NMC to got a team that tanks? A young stud that just wasn't a fit with his last team, does he want to go to a team that tanks? You completely and totally fuck your ability to acquire players YOU ALREADY KNOW ARE GOOD by tanking. That's so important, Your guessing in the draft. For every can't miss prospect like Connor McDavid, you can name a dozen Can't miss prospects like Ryan Leaf, Or Nail Yakapov, or whoever the fuck. When you look at the most successful team of the 2000s onward, The new England Patriots, the evidence becomes insanely clear. You focus on winning first and foremost. Getting your guy is even more important in football and the patriots have never tanked. Their Secret weapon is a dude they drafted in the 6th round. The Patriots won 6 superbowls in 17 years but what doesn't get talked about is that there was a decade long stretch where they didn't win the big game. A lot of those years they had major holes to fill, and yet they aren't ever tanking in those years, they are cobbling together the best team possible, and reloading with massive free agent picks that they can get, because everyone knows you can win in new england. They eventually reload and win 3 more. The result is a 20 year run that any team in any sport would absolutely kill for. Mike Tomlin gets his team above .500 like clockwork, and he's got two Superbowl wins. doesn't this guy know that the way to win is losing on purpose. The Chiefs, have picked 1st overall once in their entire teams history(Admittedly that pick was Eric Fisher, a very good player) Since the 90s they have been consistently winning 5-10 games, they hit a guy at 10 overall, and a tight end in the 3rd round, and suddenly they are off to the races. Superbowls on Superbowls. Where are all the tanking teams. Where are the Bears, The Cardinals, The Browns, The Commanders, The Jets. They are getting all those high picks. Don't those turn into championships? Hockey's the same thing. Drafting the right guys is a good part of winning, but ultimately a huge luck factor is involved there. when you tank for a chance at the right guy your hurting your fan base, your free agency power, your trading power, your ability to get good coaches, your ability to get good support staff, you're television time slots, your status withing the league, and a whole lot more. It's not worth it. Tanking sucks.
mike tomlin is one of the biggest underachievers in sports. 3 playoff wins in 12 years, most of which were with elite talent. other than that good points.
I think the general takeaway is that your GM has to understand all the ways of rebuilding beyond tanking in order to succeed. Good drafting beyond the top 3 tends to be the most decisive in making a deep organization, in addition to trades and signings. Stars, Devils, and Avalanche seem to be the proof of that lately.
My draft scenario would go like this: - All 16 non-playoff teams get a flat 5% chance for the number 1 pick, - All 8 first round playoff losers get a 2.5% chance at the number 1 pick. - For picks number 2 to number 8, just reroll if you draw a team that has already drafted, - For Picks number 9 to number 24, you draft normally, as the worst team that hasn't drafted yet gets the 9th and so on. Tanking for the 9th+ pick isn't so tasty anymore. Making the playoffs while losing in the first round still gives you a chance at a good pick. The only question I have is : With a weakish playoff hopeful (think Detroit, this year) : Would you rather have a 5% chance at the first overall pick (meaning tanking) or try to make the playoffs and get only a 2.5% chance, but get the extra revenue from that first round? I would try to make the playoffs. How about you? This scenario would force teams to hire better management so that generational talents like Daigle don't get ruined by bad front offices which would make the game better in the long run. The only caveat is that badly managed teams would probably go on a relocation frenzy to keep raking in the money, to the detriment of the fans.
I just hate the draft lottery system in general. It's just absolutely mad. When pretty much anyone can look at the rankings and predict the draft order by Christmas, of course it's gonna encourage tanking. I understand it's a "weighted lottery", but make it less so. You can still keep it weighted, while adding more randomness and luck into the mix. Right now, it feels like the entire lottery amounts to "Here are the rankings. ONE team MIGHT move up." It's a LOTTERY. I feel like ANY of the sixteen spots should be up for grabs by ANY of the sixteen teams that didn't make the playoffs. Obviously you should weigh it so that the teams with worse ranking, have a higher chance at drafting early, but it absolutely just begs for more randomness from what it is currently. You should NOT be able to predict it 100%.
This year, I believe, is the first year of the lottery that no team moved position. Last year when Chicago got Bedard they were the 3rd worst team. And ask Detroit fans how they feel in, every draft lottery, they have either stayed in their spot or fallen in the draft.
The biggest issue with me in regards to the bracket is that tanking is entirely an organizational decision, not a player decision. Good luck telling your players, "Hey, I know we didn't make the playoffs but DONT worry, if we play hard enough we'll be able to get a guy who will most likely replace you!" No one would buy into it. An athletes ultimate goal is to win, they dont step out on the ice every night saying "alright boys, lets phone this one in, our GM wants the pick!" Theres an argument to be made that teams that are genuinely bad despite their best efforts deserve some help more than teams that were 🤏 this close to making the playoffs. Relegation is a good idea but its not viable right now.
Honestly i don't know how you don't have much more views the video is well made and you're very well spoken at first i didn't like the idea of a 16 team first pick tournament because it gives an incentive to a mid table team to lose a couple game and smoke horrible teams to win the first pick but the bottom 8 idea is perfect imo
Does trading away your talent for pics or people not caring enough to play for their pay when they will be on the gold course next week count as tanking?
The truth is there have players worth tanking for, and players who didnt measure up. Crosby, Kane McDavid. But so many other #1 players are not worth tanking for.
I don't think the Penguins tanked for Crosby, it was an actual draft lottery because of the fucked up previous season no? Although they probably would've tanked anyway because they still didn't have Malkin playing.
Yeah it was a weighted lottery based on performance and picks over the previous three years. So I guess they could have "tanked" over three years eyeing when Crosby was to be drafted but that's some good foresight lol. Based on the weight teams were given additional balls in the lottery and the teams that got the most at three were Buffalo, Columbus, Rangers, and Pittsburgh for a 6% each of getting the first pick.
@plaidchuck yea that'd be major foresight lol, then again players like Crosby get seen early. They lucked out either way. Malkin and Crosby set the Pens on a pedestal.
For real, I really hate the fact that I have to somewhat cheer for my team to lose to get better odds at the lottery. It feels very wrong and they should definitely try to find better solutions. Personnally, I feel like the odds are too much in the last team favor. 25,5% odd feels like it's still high enough to be worth tanking. And it goes down all the way to 13,5% for the 2nd last team, almost half the odd. I'd say lower the last team odd to around 17% and make it so it only drop 1% for every other position. This way since the odds would be so similar from a position to another, it really wouldn't be worth it to tank. But, keep the team can't drop 2 or 3 positions rule so the very bad teams can't fall too much. And let's get rid of the teams can't move up more than 10 pick rule, to make it more exciting and random
Technically the last place team has an 18.5% chance to win the lottery, it's just that with the restriction that a team can move a maximum of 10 spots up the last place team gets the combined 7% chance that a team between 12 and 16 wins the lottery in which case that team wins the lottery and the last place team remains first.
@@jonmendelson1104 true, if they remove the can't move more than 10 spots rule it will drop them to a better overall odd I think. 18,5% seems more fair. I just think the biggest issue here is that there's too much separation between the very last team and the other bottom teams odds
@@rocky_hockey6447 Considering they just made the rule change restricting things to prevent teams from moving up more than ten spots a couple years ago, I don't see it changing any time soon. Honestly I don't think there's anything wrong with the current system. At 25.5% it's more likely than not that the last place team is going to fall down. Aside from last year with Bedard I don't think any team was actively trying to tank, though there are teams that are bad because they're rebuilding. Of course rebuilding teams trade away players who are either on expiring deals or who won't be there/good by the time the team is looking to fight for the playoffs again, but that doesn't mean they're tanking. I mentioned in another post here, the Sharks were always going to be bad this year and in the running for Celebrini, but they either led the league or were second in man games lost (depends if you count Lehner in Vegas missing 82 games). Their strength was supposed to be their centers and they had zero games this season with all four of their expected centers playing...Couture played six games, Hertl played 48 for them before getting injured (he played another six with Vegas after being traded but likely doesn't play in those games if he's still in SJ), so a significant chunk of the season was spent with Granlund (who they expected to be their 3C) as their 1C. All of those injuries elevated it from a bad season to a historically bad season.
I would LOVE a playoff lottery system. It would be awesome to see the bottom half the league get some post season exposure. It hurts teams like columbus and buffalo when they never get any post season exposure. A playoff lottery breaks the tanking problem and means more hockey.
The opportunity to play for the Stanley cup is earned not given, this cannot happen for the integrity of the sport. And how much would a team like Chicago or or San Jose really gain from getting swept instead of a team that actually deserves to be there?
I don't know about you but I'd love to sign with an NHL team at a generous rate just to get to the draft floor with the expectation of losing for a franchise player that will bring me to the promised land.
Tanking is about getting the 1OA, but that's not the goal. The goal is to get THE player. That significant player(s) is usually found near the top of the draft. But even if you get that gem, you need a team around him to win it all. It is true that a low percentage of 1OA end up win the cup, it is also true that a low percentage of the teams actually win the cup.
Fk the current lottery system. The Sens ans Red Wings got shafted so hard that the league decided they had to adjust the rules a few years back. I agree with the commenter who said the top pick should go to the tean that's been the worst over the past 3 seasons. I don't like this draft playoffs idea, but the system the PWHL uses seems reasonable (at least for a league woth 6 teams).
I love how NHL fans (encouraged by Gary Bettman) still think the league’s reward for losing stops at first overall. As though tanking and getting, say, the 3rd overall pick is not still an *incredibly* strong incentive. (And since there is no pro/rel or qualification for side competitions, there is very little incentive to win hockey games on a day-to-day basis if contention, or at least playoffs, seem unlikely). The lottery should be completely unweighted through all the non-playoff teams (currently the first 16 slots). THAT’s how you preference the weaker ones without incentivizing losing.
Development over drafting. Very few young athletes have the skill set to be competitive in the National league at 18/19. Generally that’s what the first 3 picks guarantee. Beyond that what teams are drafting is POTENTIAL and it’s up to the organization to provide the coaching and training necessary to maximize that potential. Razor thin margins for success.
I disagree. You're asking players to win a tournament for their team to have the right to draft new players to take their jobs. I would argue the incentive for the players isn't there.
I think the NFL is the only major North American sports league where tanking doesn't really happen. Of course there are teams that are bad and know they're bad, but coaches generally do their best to win. There are several notable examples where teams throw away the first overall pick with late week 17 (now week 18) wins
The Edmonton Oilers organization is definitely guilty of this , what was it 4 of 6 season's they scuttled the regular season to get Taylor Hall , Jordan Eberle and others and they lucked out with Golden boy McDavid drawing number 1 when the NHL started the draft lottery. Edmonton should have been disqualified from that lottery. I look forward to Edmonton's downfall in hell.
It's impossible to know. The NHL has changed it's lottery format so many times now that each generation of rebuilding teams faces different rules. The Red Wings, for example, bottomed out at the worst time as far as rules were concerned.. and they paid for it. I think teams tank.. sure. But the reality is that teams go through natural cycles. A long stretch of being competitive and spending assets at the deadline and trading picks for players.. it slowly eats a hole in an organization's depth. That team's core ages, and when they retire.. said team stinks. It's not tanking when that happens.. it's the result of trying to win for a long period of time. So teams like Chicago.. they tanked. But the Sharks?? They aren't tanking, they just stink. That's why I prefer a standard draft. No gimmicks. No lottery.
Tanking is more effective than missing the playoffs by couple points and getting a worse pick with also most likely wasted assets to acquire veteran talent at trade deadline for a playoff push.
This is a good video, but I think it does not acknowledge a harsh reality. You will never eliminate some form of tanking--if we understand it as strategic losing--completely, and I am not sure we should want to eliminate strategic losing. Tanking, or at least losing some margin of games strategically, is always going to be incentivized on some margin in any system where worse teams are given some advantage in drafting. And it is not a bad thing to give worse teams some advantage in drafting to maintain long-term competitive parity. Nobody wants to see a league where, like it was prior to the Salary Cap, only a select few teams every decade have a shot at it, or where it's like college football where the rich just always get richer. So I am fine with accepting that some level of tanking is going to occur in any system if it means better parity. There is an inherent tradeoff between draft systems that improve parity and those that eliminate incentives for tanking. That does not mean there is not room for improvement over the status quo, but I do not think a competitive playoff for draft picks would ever be introduced for one reason: the players union would view it as a non-starter. I also am not sure it would be a good idea. Sometimes, teams legitimately do become quite bad through the natural process of their core aging. This system would likely create a trap for such teams. Whereas now the worst place to be is the mushy middle, in that system it would incentivize teams to go for the mushy middle. While that is an imporvement on the status quo, it seems unrealitstic and might be too far in the respecting established talent direction. I think the Gold plan the PWHA has probably strikes the balance between parity and anti-tanking the best. Yes, it would incentivize losing early in the season, but it would make the trade deadline market far more strategically interesting (no more trading away everyone with a pulse if you are a seller), and would provide incentive not to fall below a certain floor of mediocrity else it would make winning late in the season far too hard. Also, it has the bonus of being something the PA could actually get on board with.
I understand the point you're making, and I am a Sharks fan so I might be speaking from a biased POV, however I really think you are looking at this too black and white. True, it has been frustrating living the past 5 years knowing that my hockey team sucks and I shouldn't expect anything from this year, but I know that realistically, this is the best thing we can do to win in the future. Your praise of the '19 Blues, '23 Knights and '07 Ducks is based on the fact that they made incredibly savvy roster moves that got them over the hump, but circumstances such as those are extraordinarily rare and cannot be relied on. Plus, in my opinion, I don't think it's admirable at all to win because you traded for star players, then sports would become a competition of "who is able to make this one trade". You talk about all the teams who have attempted tanking to have it not work, but don't mention the fact that there are far, far more teams that tried to make do with what they had and ended up in a constant state of mediocrity with little to no identity (the Coyotes are a prime example), or that had maybe one or two shots at a cup and came up short, and then had no aspirations for years after because they traded their assets away going all in. As for tanking itself being bad, I don't love it, but it's undeniably the best path for a franchise when done right. A lot of failed rebuilds that are due to poor management would still be so without tanking, the tanking mentality isn't the problem, management is. But even with tanking rebuilds that fail due to mismanagement, it's still by far the best way to build a winner. There's a reason that the Penguins, Lightning, and Blackhawks have not only been consistently winning cups, but being a mainstay in the playoffs: They built a strong foundation through their draft that keeps them/kept them competitive for over a decade. They won as many cups as they did because they had many, many opportunities. Of course tanking doesn't reliably lead to cups, inherently only 1/32 teams win the cup every year, just because you don't win the cup doesn't mean you failed. Building a team, in my eyes, should be about maximizing your teams odds at winning a championship. Sure, the Blues won in 2019, but they've only had one other fair chance of winning it again since then (2022). The Knights won it last year, but they were a few games away from missing the playoffs the very next year, and it seems like that downward trend is going to continue over the next few years. I think the Blackhawks, Ducks or Sharks are far more likely to win a cup in the next 10 years than the Blues or Knights. As a Sharks fan, I know for a fact that winning now is basically impossible, whether we tank or not, so I'm fine with not paying as much attention and waiting for homegrown players for me to become attached to. And it does make for bad hockey, but think about the alternatives. The 2nd playoffs, generally speaking would be won by the teams who just barely missed the playoffs, they'd draft good players, and return to the playoffs, knocking down new teams, and the cycle repeats. The teams who are at the bottom (no matter if they're tanking or not, there will be teams that are the worst in the league), have to just hope they hit on picks later in the draft. The same few teams will be in that 11-16th pick range every year, and do not have the resources, present or future, to compete with the teams that are getting the top picks, and no lure for any free agents looking to win a cup. Now THAT would make for disinterested fans. I actually like the gold standard, because it gives us a reason to keep watching and still rooting for our team. I've been rooting for the Sharks to lose any games not against the Knights for years, and of course I'd like to have some time rooting for my team. It's better than the 2nd playoffs because it creates equity for those bottom teams by giving them more time to rack up points. Sorry for the word bomb, great video, the fact that I had the passion to write a response like this is rare, and you have intrigued me like few others have in the past. Keep up the great work :D
Well said. Your point about a loser cup resulting in the same weak teams getting weaker while the ones who barely missed the wildcard get back into the mix faster is exactly the problem I have with such a solution. A "pity" system of some kind, where teams who have been repeatedly denied 1OA picks or have been constantly leapfrogged have their odds slowly increased would make things a bit more even I think, but wouldn't solve the tanking issue. Not sure what the solution is :/
Well if you have sub par development or bad scouting you kind of have to tank now for new blood. There's no duct taping a team together via free agency like before the cap. Even then you have to have good talent to produce on an entry level contract otherwise you'll have no free cash to add depth to the lineup. I kind of like the idea of having the NBAs soft cap with luxury tax. Teams that suck could just go for it over the cap if they wanted to with a free agent if the owners had the money. You'd have to have some control so that big money teams wouldn't just buy out everybody but I think it could add some excitement to perennially crappy teams which would mean more revenue for the league and players overall.
He "ran it into the ground" because the owner told him he was to do his best to make the playoffs every year. It wasn't until Greer got hired that he said "rebuild" and that was only once at his 1st press conference. But they are going to suffer in their rebuilding because they don't have the high end talent to trade away to get good draft picks and prospects.
Most recent/blatant case was Toronto drafting Marner in 2015, they "decided" to send him back to the OHL's London Knights for another frivolous year. Yet Marner was not able to earn a spot on Toronto's bad roster for the 2015-16 season? This ensured they were bad enough and in line for Matthews the next draft. No wonder non Leaf fans detest this franchise.
It doesn't. Only if you're certain franchises which get awarded 1st picks by the NHL when you get to a rebuild and there's a generational talent laying around. Basically Chicago and Pittsburgh.
The sabres tanked on purpose got the #2 pick twice then they tanked by accident due to malpractice and got the #1 pick twice. Haven’t made the playoffs still
We don’t talk enough about how they were legitimately trying to win when they ended up with dahlin and power. Probably 2 of the worst coach’s in NHL history
The truth is the players don’t tank, the head brass and ownership absolutely tank
Precisely this. The players don't tank. The owners will trade anything valuable/productive away though.
lmao obviously. the video never claims this..
@@generaldoof7334players want to win of course and give it their all on the ice, yet as much as they want to win, it becomes impossible when teams’ front offices will assemble rosters specifically to not win.
Thats 100% true. No player wants to play like shit.
You can see the "tank" mindset with management by trading quality players for draft picks, aswell as calling up prospects to play while simultaneously making their current team worse.
I can't fathom a player whose dream its been to play in the NHL and win a cup purposely play bad in hopes they get a high pick.
Yup, players are playing for legacy or their next contract.
I love the way that Dallas has built their team with Heiskanen being the only high pick in in the draft. Just crushing it with their late 1sts and 2nd rounders in the last several years.
And with stankoven it’s just getting better. As a neutral fan if they don’t at least get one cup it’s genuinely gonna shock me
And the Stars definitely didn't tank to get Miro Heiskanen, considering they won the Central Division in 2016 and made it all the way to Game 7 of Round 2 before suffering severe regression and finishing well out of a playoff spot, only to get rewarded with the ping pong balls.
Such a great scouting team
Mavrik Bourque just won AHL player of the year too and is on the way. They're going to have to break up that team it's not fair to rest of the league lol.
And they didn’t even tank to get him, they just got insanely lucky and moved up. Dallas, St. Louis, NYR are all so good at drafting. Washington used to be, but they haven’t had a hit in a while.
Great video, though I do disagree with the idea that all tanking is inherently bad. The NHL is a business and the decision to trade good players to reset the timeline and be in contention for elite talent is simply asset management. As a fan, I'd much rather watch a handful of bad years and become excited for the draft and free agency rather than watch my team spin their tires for a decade and never get over the hump. Even 3 or 4 top picks doesn't guarantee wins, you need competent ownership, management, and leadership to win.
If we're arguing the "integrity of the sport", I think the NHL gets it right the most of any other major sport in NA. The NFL doesn't have a draft lottery at all, the MLB only has a 6-team lottery, and the NBA is a superstar league where one player can transform a team.
Totally agree, I'm sure the Browns spending all of those years as an irrelevant franchise is worse when the NFL picks are guaranteed.
I agree, trading good players to contenders for extra draft picks is a sacrifice for the future and I am fine with that being rewarded. Buffalo and Ottawa show that there are risks to team morale and culture if you take it too far and try to tank for an extended period of time, teams that empty the cupboards too hard get so bad that they get a culture of losing and can't aquire players for years. But if they do it wisely they collect heaps of young players that learn and develop together with maybe a couple older mentors left from previous years while others were moved to contenders. This process also gets a lot of the best players to playoff teams which makes the playoffs even deeper with high end talent. if all the teams were keeping their ageing talent to win 36 games insteasd of 32 that would kind of feel like a wsate
True, the Devils might not win a cup but over the next 10+ years they’ll be competitive as they tanked for like 6+ years to get good players.
Moment of silence for Leafs fans who haven't made it out of the first round of the playoffs for 7/8 years
@BloodRider1914 they made it out if the first round 2 years ago when, then lost to #8 Florida
You notice Gary says players and coaches don't intentionally tank/lose. Yet he fails to mention the front office.
He did that for a reason. He's a lawyer, after all.
The Sharks did not tank. They were contenders for about two decades and did their best to keep the team competitive years past their prime (already past it the year they went to the SCF). They've had a lot of injuries and traded bad contracts and players who no longer wished to be part of the team. It was a much deserved lottery win.
On paper, I agree. But with context of how often the Sharks egregiously choked in the playoffs; They don’t deserve shit, Because who’s to say ,that they won’t waste that draft pick’s career on playoff ineptitude, as well?
@@elijahechicagobearsboyd5734 nice bait
Agreed, they spent a lot of money in the 2010s on expensive older players since they had a better chance on a good playoff run, so hopefully a rebuild with a young roster will pan out in the next few years
In the proposed bottom 16 playoffs, would the players have any motivation to try and get a player who might replace them? Is a bottom 6 guy on the 19th place team going to put any effort in to help a team he’s not personally invested in? Players would 100% rather get the time off, and this proposed system had the danger of trapping a team in last forever. Few teams will win the cup, but top prospects can make a team a contender (ex: Vancouver) which is good for the fans.
But, it enables taking the cowards way out, by intentionally losing; which SHOULD NEVER be rewarded..
I always had this idea that the draft order or the lottery odds should be based on the combined records from previous three seasons. That way tanking would not be possible unless it's your long-term plan, and the team rewarded with the first overall pick would always be the worst in the League.
Ohh, that is a really good idea
The problem is that it would punish being a middle of the road team that might get into the playoffs as a 6, 7, 8 seed. The reality of the league would be that a middle of the road year is a gigantic waste as it harms your next three drafts (vs tanking) and it has a very low likelihood of resulting in a cup (vs being an obvious contender). So the correct strategic decision for front offices would be to either be in a complete tanking state or be in a contending state which would be so rare that you could easily have 5-10 teams trying to be as garbage as possible because the value of increased odds/better draft order is far more worthwhile considering you have to plan to rebuild across a minimum of three years of basement dwelling.
Great breakdown, would love to see your take on the salary cap era CBAs with lockouts and cap circumvention controversy.
Same
His videos obviously take a long time to make. Idk if he would put in that much work for a niche video that may not get many views.
One thing lost on a lot of people was that the Oilers got Hall after being the most injured team in the previous season with 530 man-games lost to injury compared to 200-300 for the next closest team. It looked like a decision made late in the season for them.
Pardon this simple country hockey fan, but I do have a few vexing questions I hope someone more learned than I might shed some light on.
What's the difference between tanking, just being bad, or going through a proper rebuild and making smart hockey decisions towards building for the future? It seems to me that it's way too easy to just pigeonhole any team that finishes in last place in a year as being tankers, but someone is always going to finish last whether they're a tanker or not.
How do bad teams improve without building through the draft? Free agents have to want to come play for a team, and with a hard salary cap in place you can't just keep writing more zeroes on the check until you've got a championship roster. Game breaking talent almost never hits the market, teams lock them up for the best part of their career. It's nearly impossible for a bottom place team to trade for top talent, elite players all have NTCs and NMCs.
Very good points. And I've felt there's a difference between a team doing a scorched earth over a team trying to rebuild their foundation.
tanking is pretty much when management fields a team that will give them the best chance to lose, but yeah it’s hard to distinguish tanking from rebuilding
Good points. Lots of the points in the video are valid, but they are only really valid if you disregard all losing/being bad as tanking
The Wild are one of the in-between teams, a team that (due to cap hell because of the buyouts) are inbetween a first round exit and missing the playoffs, despite a lot of tallent on the roster
With a 1st overall pick tournament, teams in the in-between would stand a much better chance of rising out of purgatory with elite young tallent that would have the environment for them to grow and prosper with less chance of busting
Bias speaking from being a Wild fan, but its a great idea
Isles but with talent
Hockey nerdness on an absolute next level. Such brilliant comedy involved with the quick cuts. Well done.
Having a tournament at the end of the season to determine who gets 1st overall is a VERY BAD idea. If I was a player on a losing team, why would I compete in order to get a player that would replace me? Also what about players who are upcoming free agents? Why would they want to help a team that they won't be on next season?
Im from Buffalo. The running bet is whom between the 2 oldest NHL teams to have never won a Cup, Sabres and Canucks, will win the Cup first. This year, 2024, Vancouver is still in the running. Good grief!
Fantastic argument against tanking can be found with the Senators and Lightning who showed it matters a whole hell of a lot more if you draft smart and have a good scouting department
using the senators as a positive example for anything = all credibility lost
@@rapta_gg8059 i'm pretty sure he's using the senators as a _negative_ example.
First: bettman is an absolute plug.
Second: tanking does happen and it sucks.
Third: well done video. Thanks for the numbers breakdown on players.
Man your videos are so good I keep rewatching them and they are just as good every time
23:17 There's actually a little more to this - plenty of teams who weren't contenders in 2004 sold a lot of their best players not (solely) because they were tanking, but also because it was widely accepted that whenever the new CBA would be implemented, a salary cap would be as well.
Jagr was the highest-paid player in 2004 ($11M), and the four you mentioned commanded a combined payroll of $24.1M, which is over 60% of what would be the $39M cap. So it made sense to get returns on elite players when they might hamstring your franchise otherwise.
Great video, you definitely deserve more subs! :)
your and district fives voice sound so good damn similair i thought yall were the same perosn lol
The 🐐 speaks
Last season, I was at the last ANA Ducks game chanting "We want Bedard !", wanting to lose to ensure last spot in the NHL and highest #1 draft odds; this also only occurred because CHI Blackhawks got points in their last 2 games, so you could say Ducks tanked better at the end than the Blackhawks... But we all know what happens next, CHI moves up in the draft and gets Bedard and ANA falls to 2nd. CHI gets another generational talent 1st pick and Ducks still don't have a 1st. Would have been nice if ANA went UP this year but no justice. Will never be able to see Bedard the same after this.
i feel your pain, as a jackets fan it was a very similar situation. i was at the home finale and was pissed we beat the pens because it put us #2, and you guys moved up to #1 in the odds. and of course they leaked columbus fell to #3 before they were supposed to announce it, that was pretty upsetting too
What a fucking great video. It's a shame the views don't reflect that. Your idea of a Draft pick playoff bracket sounds amazing.
Please don't be discouraged by this videos lack of views, you are one of the only hockey youtubers that makes actually well researched, well produced videos about interesting topics. Not just clickbaity, game-reviewy bullshit like every other hockey youtuber.
Most of his videos that are like this blow up. It will get caught up by the algorithm and recommended to people. Don't worry.
I don't see how players will be motivated to play in a draft pick playoff though. If they play well, their employer gets the benefit of a high pick while they essentially just get nothing. I don't even think a bonus for the whole team if they win will be enough to truly motivate them.
Also, teams that traded away their first overall pick and still didn't make the playoffs will still try to tank in this format.
Cool video! Tanking definitely can work for some teams some times, but it's not the cure-all that some fans really seem to think it is, especially for hockey. There's a quote from an NBA exec that IIRC says "you either want to be at the very top or at the very bottom, not in between," but basketball isn't hockey. One player can't change the entire fortunes of your franchise
It gets annoying having to tell my fellow Isles fans this. What the sabres are now, the Islanders used to be. They sucked in the 90s, got rid of a lot of prospects to try to "win now" in the early 2000s (while never winning a playoff series), sucked again, and are now in a period of somewhat sustained success (playoffs in last 5 of 6 years, 2 ECF trips), ironically enough, right after our 1OA left in free agency. Tanking is not a guaranteed ticket to a cup, a lot of time it's just a lot of losing and watching bad hockey, which I sure as hell don't want to do
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said, especially the part about being appalled at the prospect of watching my favorite team egregiously lose, just for a mere chance of obtaining a generational talent..
Very well done video. Loved discussing all the built in problems with the draft system like how trading away everything you have for a few teenagers does may always mean success. I understand where you are coming from with the addition of a tournament to win the first overall pick and think that a bottom 8 bracket would be awesome since no other leagues do this. At the end of the day people need to understand that the front office is what puts together these winners. You compare Buffalo to the new regime in Chicago it’s night and day.
The current format is actually pretty good. And I say this as a Wings fan having the worst draft lottery luck in a decade. Relegation would be the most pure, honest form of competition, but in today’s corporate culture in sports, it’ll never happen.
Maybe one change is how the percentages are weighted. That could be tweaked. But if you take a step back and look at it overall, a 32 team league is going to have teams who just downright suck. And others who tend to win more. The draft lottery system has worked really well. Vast majority of teams, despite such a large league, can hang their hat on some level of success, a cup, finals a deep run, or hope for future. That’s a huge accomplishment. That’s all thanks to Bettman. (I’ll never understand why so many fans hate him). It’s probably Canadian fans since he’s American. Anyone who knows anything about business will tell you that Bettman has been nothing short of incredible in the job he’s done.
just realise that u have 6k sub, thats an insanly good video for a small youtuber, good job continue like that!
Good video but it isn't that simple. Tanking is more involved than just getting a high draft pick. It has interplay with the cap, drafting, development, injury luck, ect. Here are some of the key things you can't skip over in this discussion.
1st of all you didn't even touch on the reason why the draft exists. The purpose is to maintain parity. The worst teams getting the best players. Anything that disrupts that relationship defeats the purpose.
2nd Drafting isn't the be all end all because drafting is an imperfect skill. You are going to be better or worse at it depending on personnel and even then you're still trying to predict the future. You can't predict injuries or development outcomes.
3rd You have to factor in the cap advantages of ELC's it's a huge reason why having good young players is so valuable. It's the only class of player that is not paid what they are worth. (or more realistically more than what they are worth because of free agent bidding wars).
The guy doesn't have to explain literally everything about drafting. You can use a bit of common sense to assume psychics aren't doing the drafting and cheap contracts are good in a salary cup league lol
This video deserves much bigger audience
Outstanding analysis. Made me wonder though... How many teams have, or had, first round draft picks? If most teams have a top pick on their roster that would make winning with a top pick even less of a guarantee. Also, some first rounds like Crosby and McDavid came in and were immediately committed to the team, becoming great leaders. Was Daigle? I don't remember it that way.
The Ducks were one of the best teams in the western conference from 2013 to 2018. At the end, the ducks had a extremely old core of Perry, Getzlaf, Kesler, Bieksa, Beauchemin, and Vermette. The cost of going all out at the end is the complete collapse of the core and the Ducks have been trying to pick up the pieces since. Sometimes tanking is less deliberate and more of a guarantee when you pay everything for one last run.
I imagine this will be the exact fate of the Bruins and Penguins in the coming years.
As a hockey fan from Washington, DC… tough but fair.
I thought the "Drag the franchise out to relevance" was uncalled for. Capitals have had a large and devoted fanbase for almost 20 years. At what point are you allowed to be a real boy?
Two of your videos watched. Both are well thought out, well researched, great explanations with excellent graphics and timely highlights and strong musical choices. Subscribed. I will watch them all.
as a fan of the blue jackets who've been doing mostly tanking for their entire existence with our best team getting eliminated in the second round... Tanking sucks
I do kind of like the idea of a bottom 8 draft tournament
This channel deserves to blow up. These videos are so well made
Would be very interesting to see how the trade markets would change if there was a playoff for the picks
Coming from somewhere whose only recently getting into hockey, but still knows a little bit about the sport’s history, due to watching urinatingtree videos and absolutely despises the premise of tanking; I would absolutely love a postseason for the 1st round pick!
In the intro, I was thinking “yes of course tanking works, how do you think Chicago got Bedard or Montreal got Slafkovsky?” Then when I saw the video of Nail Yakupov, I thought “oh crap that’s a good point” 💀
The Pens didn't tank to get Crosby or Fleury because at that time the Pens in fact were struggling at that time from 2002-2003 season until 2005-2006 season financially and as a team the Pens were almost bankrupt until Mario Lemieux saved them by getting a group of people including Lemieux himself purchasing stakes in the team. They almost moved and changed cities.
GREAT video! Create a REASON for teams NOT TO WANT TO LOSE. A N D at the same time a REASON for other teams to WANT TO WIN. (stick with me)... The bottom place NHL team gets sent to the AHL. The top team in the AHL gets promoted to the NHL. THERES YOUR REASON..in the AHL to want to win. It (I believe) works that way in European soccer.
That would be impossible since the AHL teams are affiliated with NHL teams and some are even owned by them
I'm a Sharks fan, and I was against the current tank. You strip away the culture of the team, which makes fans less invested in the team. And in order to guarantee a bottom 3 finish, you have to absolutely gut your roster. Meier, Hertl, Burns and Karlsson had to all be traded. Couture was conveniently injured. Ppl were calling them a dying team as early as 2014, but they came back for two good cup runs, surpassing their prime which was around 2010, not just once but twice.
At some point, most teams have to rebuild in some manner, but tanking where you deliberately off-load good players is not necessary and there's no guarantee that it all falls in place. Edmonton failed their first attempt because those 3 1st picks in a row weren't great. What they needed was a solid core and they got that by drafting McDavid, Draisaitl, Bouchard and Nurse. It was the same for all the other teams. Colorado too, had to do two rebuilds. The 2nd one is always a softer rebuild, which shows that it's not necessary to tank a team. Meanwhile you have a team like the Rangers who made a really quick rebuild and teams like Dallas and Carolina who never went for a true rebuild and have instead gradually built a really strong team through drafting and trades. I envy the fans of teams like that. San Jose in the 2010's was that kind of team actually, but it's not anymore.
I love the irony that the one team you use as the only team that won without a top 3 pick, owes it's entire existence on the spoils of a former #1 pick that refused to sign with them, and created the most ridiculously lopsided trade in order to get rid of that player. All of that, only to be picked up and moved to Colorado the very next year, just one year, and one key component shy of a Stanley Cup. Talk about a turnkey operation.
Edit: Added this comment while only about halfway through the video. I'm glad to see that you added the Lindros issue near the end.
In all, a very well researched, and put together piece. This definitely made me a subscriber. Thanks for putting in the hard work to do this.
I wonder what would happen if the draft were reversed and the team who finishes first were rewarded with the first overall pick, heh.
yzerman is showing this video to the whole redwings organization
They already know this. Show this to 971 afternoon show.
@@davidkruse4030that show doesn't know a damn thing about hockey. You would get further arguing with a brick wall.
I have a really bad team based on draft numbers. Wow, we must stink! the lousy low picks we've gotten include:
Draft #
#25 David Pastrnak
# 63 David Krejci
#56 Zdeno Chara
#71 Brad Marchand
#45 Patrice Bergeron
#217 Our latest Stanley cup-winning goalie, Tim Thomas was drafted to the Nordics
B's latest Vezina awarded goalie, Ullmark, was drafted #163
Yeah we got to start tanking to get some better players...
🐻
The Bruins know how to develop players, and they got one of the best farm systems in the league
First, a lot of goalies go later because of how long it takes to develop them. Second, and more importantly, teams have to have really good scouts and development team to get players like that late in the draft. There is a reason people make a big deal if a player becomes a star and they were drafted after the 3rd round.
Sharks & Leafs fan here… it was so obvious Chicago tanked last year, the goalie threw a 🍕 up the middle then whiped out 😮 this year it was painful to lose by football scores to teams… if Logan doesn’t have a mystery injury all year he’s simply too good to make a complete tank, the team turned around for 5-10 games in mid-season when he came back, they had moxy/confidence so we could say “the future is bright” 🎉😊
I have thought so much about everything you said. Makes me more proud of the fact the Canucks have come as far as they have without tanking. Good drafting and signings and trades. Really hope we finish off the Oilers this round, otherwise it helps reinforce that all you really have to do is sit back, tank and get your McDavid's to win. It's a travesty Bedard went to the Blackhawks.
I mean from 2013 to 2019 we drafted six top ten picks in seven years. And many of those picks are our current core, so...
Also the Oilers needed to basically blow three first overall picks before even they got a McDavid.
Aside from a handful of sure-bit pre-draft bets, drafting is hard and you can never be sure if a player will make it or not.
Shockingly, it really depends WHO the top player in the draft is as to how “worth it” that it is to tank.
The only two “good pieces” of championship teams from the 2010 draft have been Tarasenko and Carlson. Then in 2011 the best player was taken in the 2nd round, and as much as we love Nuge he was never going to be a #1 centre on a contending team. Then 2012 😑 yeah thanks for the first pick that year when none of the top 4 picks even play in the league anymore.
I don’t think that I’m being biased when I say that those were three of arguably the worst three years to get the first pick in a ten year span, and the Oilers got them back to back to back.
And then, even if you do get the first pick, and you do get “that guy”, you NEED to already have pieces in place to succeed.
Penguins already had Letang, Fleury and Malkin before they got Crosby. Chicago already had Kieth, Seabrook and a few other guys before they got Kane and Toews.
Oilers had NOTHING when they started picking first over all. Management still thought they were a finals team in 2009. Sure they got McDavid in 2015, but they needed Klefbom, Nurse, Draisaitl and Nuge ahead of him in order to compete. And even then they still needed one more pick in Bouchard to really round out the group.
All this to say, we’ll go back in time and trade the Canucks 2/3 of our 1st over all picks from those three years for LITERALLY NOTHING, and both teams will be in the exact same place that they are now.
As a Sabres fan this was just one gut punch after another. 😂
You missed the Flyers with the first overall pick thing, yes 75 they got to pick first via a trade, but if we are talking strictly natural first overall pick, the Flyers have never had that luxury.
underated videos, what an hidden gem!
The final proposal wil have stern resistance from the national teams and the IIHF (the International Ice Hockey Federation). The IIHF World Championship is usually held around the Second Round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. This allows players from already eliminated teams to suit up for their countries and fight for the gold. If the NHL introduce a similar tournament for the bottom 16 will result a much shallower talent pool from which national team coaches can pick. And for Canada and the United States especially they will have to resort to juniors, minor leaguers and whatever journeymen they find playing in Europe. These teams will be oblitterated by the European teams like Sweden, Finland or Czechia who can easilly fill the void with players from their domestic leagues. Russia also would've been at advantage as they can rely on the KHL'ers, but as we all know - they're banned from international competition. And the it's in IIHF's best interest to have NHL players participating in the World Championship's Elite division (the IIHF's World Championship is a bit different from other sports as it employs promotion and relegation system across their 5 divisions for 9 seperate tournaments).
As a ducks fan who had to watch the Blackhawks get bedard instead I can confidently say that tanking does not work
Players never tank. But yes management will
Best option to tanking I've heard... Great idea
great video. Expertly edited and informative.
I think the lesson is that top prospects are just one cog of a championship. Management, coaching, development, and all around team composition along with a bit of luck are just as important.
Love your content. Great video, but here are my strong opinions on tanking.
Tanking sucks, it has always sucked. It's a low percentage play.
For every team that makes off with a Lemieux, a Dozen teams end up with a replacement level player that they just wasted a whole fucking season on. The discussion would be different if you always got your guy, but most of the time you don't.
Losing is Rot. When you look at the extremely successful sports franchises, the ones that are always competing for decades on end. They simply do not tank. They spend there lul year competing, and then the they power back up with Drafting, development, free agency, and Trading.
Your an aging vet. Are you ever going to a team that has a history of tanking. One that might just fold one of your last seasons left.
Are you ever waiving a NMC to got a team that tanks?
A young stud that just wasn't a fit with his last team, does he want to go to a team that tanks?
You completely and totally fuck your ability to acquire players YOU ALREADY KNOW ARE GOOD by tanking. That's so important, Your guessing in the draft. For every can't miss prospect like Connor McDavid, you can name a dozen Can't miss prospects like Ryan Leaf, Or Nail Yakapov, or whoever the fuck.
When you look at the most successful team of the 2000s onward, The new England Patriots, the evidence becomes insanely clear. You focus on winning first and foremost. Getting your guy is even more important in football and the patriots have never tanked. Their Secret weapon is a dude they drafted in the 6th round. The Patriots won 6 superbowls in 17 years but what doesn't get talked about is that there was a decade long stretch where they didn't win the big game. A lot of those years they had major holes to fill, and yet they aren't ever tanking in those years, they are cobbling together the best team possible, and reloading with massive free agent picks that they can get, because everyone knows you can win in new england. They eventually reload and win 3 more. The result is a 20 year run that any team in any sport would absolutely kill for.
Mike Tomlin gets his team above .500 like clockwork, and he's got two Superbowl wins. doesn't this guy know that the way to win is losing on purpose.
The Chiefs, have picked 1st overall once in their entire teams history(Admittedly that pick was Eric Fisher, a very good player) Since the 90s they have been consistently winning 5-10 games, they hit a guy at 10 overall, and a tight end in the 3rd round, and suddenly they are off to the races. Superbowls on Superbowls.
Where are all the tanking teams. Where are the Bears, The Cardinals, The Browns, The Commanders, The Jets. They are getting all those high picks. Don't those turn into championships?
Hockey's the same thing. Drafting the right guys is a good part of winning, but ultimately a huge luck factor is involved there. when you tank for a chance at the right guy your hurting your fan base, your free agency power, your trading power, your ability to get good coaches, your ability to get good support staff, you're television time slots, your status withing the league, and a whole lot more. It's not worth it.
Tanking sucks.
mike tomlin is one of the biggest underachievers in sports. 3 playoff wins in 12 years, most of which were with elite talent. other than that good points.
Keep preaching, dude!
Tanking’s for an incompetent cowards!
Fascinating video
I think the general takeaway is that your GM has to understand all the ways of rebuilding beyond tanking in order to succeed. Good drafting beyond the top 3 tends to be the most decisive in making a deep organization, in addition to trades and signings. Stars, Devils, and Avalanche seem to be the proof of that lately.
Great video! Love this kind of topic
Great video, great work... deserves more views
No it doesn't, unless you are Chicago. Signed, Detroit Red Wings fan.
Don't forget Pittsburgh.
My draft scenario would go like this:
- All 16 non-playoff teams get a flat 5% chance for the number 1 pick,
- All 8 first round playoff losers get a 2.5% chance at the number 1 pick.
- For picks number 2 to number 8, just reroll if you draw a team that has already drafted,
- For Picks number 9 to number 24, you draft normally, as the worst team that hasn't drafted yet gets the 9th and so on.
Tanking for the 9th+ pick isn't so tasty anymore. Making the playoffs while losing in the first round still gives you a chance at a good pick.
The only question I have is : With a weakish playoff hopeful (think Detroit, this year) : Would you rather have a 5% chance at the first overall pick (meaning tanking) or try to make the playoffs and get only a 2.5% chance, but get the extra revenue from that first round? I would try to make the playoffs. How about you?
This scenario would force teams to hire better management so that generational talents like Daigle don't get ruined by bad front offices which would make the game better in the long run. The only caveat is that badly managed teams would probably go on a relocation frenzy to keep raking in the money, to the detriment of the fans.
I just hate the draft lottery system in general. It's just absolutely mad. When pretty much anyone can look at the rankings and predict the draft order by Christmas, of course it's gonna encourage tanking. I understand it's a "weighted lottery", but make it less so. You can still keep it weighted, while adding more randomness and luck into the mix. Right now, it feels like the entire lottery amounts to "Here are the rankings. ONE team MIGHT move up."
It's a LOTTERY. I feel like ANY of the sixteen spots should be up for grabs by ANY of the sixteen teams that didn't make the playoffs. Obviously you should weigh it so that the teams with worse ranking, have a higher chance at drafting early, but it absolutely just begs for more randomness from what it is currently. You should NOT be able to predict it 100%.
This year, I believe, is the first year of the lottery that no team moved position. Last year when Chicago got Bedard they were the 3rd worst team. And ask Detroit fans how they feel in, every draft lottery, they have either stayed in their spot or fallen in the draft.
The biggest issue with me in regards to the bracket is that tanking is entirely an organizational decision, not a player decision.
Good luck telling your players, "Hey, I know we didn't make the playoffs but DONT worry, if we play hard enough we'll be able to get a guy who will most likely replace you!"
No one would buy into it. An athletes ultimate goal is to win, they dont step out on the ice every night saying "alright boys, lets phone this one in, our GM wants the pick!"
Theres an argument to be made that teams that are genuinely bad despite their best efforts deserve some help more than teams that were 🤏 this close to making the playoffs. Relegation is a good idea but its not viable right now.
Well, something needs to be done to prevent tanking! It’s a black eye on EVERY sport, as it kills the integrity and honor of any sport.
Great video man, well done
YES!!! District 5 POSTED TODAY!!!
💥💥The playoff for the number one pick is a dumb idea.
Honestly i don't know how you don't have much more views the video is well made and you're very well spoken at first i didn't like the idea of a 16 team first pick tournament because it gives an incentive to a mid table team to lose a couple game and smoke horrible teams to win the first pick but the bottom 8 idea is perfect imo
Does trading away your talent for pics or people not caring enough to play for their pay when they will be on the gold course next week count as tanking?
The truth is there have players worth tanking for, and players who didnt measure up. Crosby, Kane McDavid. But so many other #1 players are not worth tanking for.
Yeah nhl draft is a crapshoot compared to every other leave. Many top 10s dont even make it to the nhl
I don't think the Penguins tanked for Crosby, it was an actual draft lottery because of the fucked up previous season no? Although they probably would've tanked anyway because they still didn't have Malkin playing.
Yeah it was a weighted lottery based on performance and picks over the previous three years. So I guess they could have "tanked" over three years eyeing when Crosby was to be drafted but that's some good foresight lol.
Based on the weight teams were given additional balls in the lottery and the teams that got the most at three were Buffalo, Columbus, Rangers, and Pittsburgh for a 6% each of getting the first pick.
@plaidchuck yea that'd be major foresight lol, then again players like Crosby get seen early. They lucked out either way. Malkin and Crosby set the Pens on a pedestal.
For real, I really hate the fact that I have to somewhat cheer for my team to lose to get better odds at the lottery. It feels very wrong and they should definitely try to find better solutions.
Personnally, I feel like the odds are too much in the last team favor. 25,5% odd feels like it's still high enough to be worth tanking. And it goes down all the way to 13,5% for the 2nd last team, almost half the odd. I'd say lower the last team odd to around 17% and make it so it only drop 1% for every other position. This way since the odds would be so similar from a position to another, it really wouldn't be worth it to tank. But, keep the team can't drop 2 or 3 positions rule so the very bad teams can't fall too much. And let's get rid of the teams can't move up more than 10 pick rule, to make it more exciting and random
Technically the last place team has an 18.5% chance to win the lottery, it's just that with the restriction that a team can move a maximum of 10 spots up the last place team gets the combined 7% chance that a team between 12 and 16 wins the lottery in which case that team wins the lottery and the last place team remains first.
@@jonmendelson1104 true, if they remove the can't move more than 10 spots rule it will drop them to a better overall odd I think. 18,5% seems more fair. I just think the biggest issue here is that there's too much separation between the very last team and the other bottom teams odds
@@rocky_hockey6447 Considering they just made the rule change restricting things to prevent teams from moving up more than ten spots a couple years ago, I don't see it changing any time soon.
Honestly I don't think there's anything wrong with the current system. At 25.5% it's more likely than not that the last place team is going to fall down. Aside from last year with Bedard I don't think any team was actively trying to tank, though there are teams that are bad because they're rebuilding. Of course rebuilding teams trade away players who are either on expiring deals or who won't be there/good by the time the team is looking to fight for the playoffs again, but that doesn't mean they're tanking.
I mentioned in another post here, the Sharks were always going to be bad this year and in the running for Celebrini, but they either led the league or were second in man games lost (depends if you count Lehner in Vegas missing 82 games). Their strength was supposed to be their centers and they had zero games this season with all four of their expected centers playing...Couture played six games, Hertl played 48 for them before getting injured (he played another six with Vegas after being traded but likely doesn't play in those games if he's still in SJ), so a significant chunk of the season was spent with Granlund (who they expected to be their 3C) as their 1C. All of those injuries elevated it from a bad season to a historically bad season.
I would LOVE a playoff lottery system. It would be awesome to see the bottom half the league get some post season exposure. It hurts teams like columbus and buffalo when they never get any post season exposure. A playoff lottery breaks the tanking problem and means more hockey.
The opportunity to play for the Stanley cup is earned not given, this cannot happen for the integrity of the sport. And how much would a team like Chicago or or San Jose really gain from getting swept instead of a team that actually deserves to be there?
I don't know about you but I'd love to sign with an NHL team at a generous rate just to get to the draft floor with the expectation of losing for a franchise player that will bring me to the promised land.
I'd like to see the first round completely random and the following rounds last to first.
That's how you gift Crosby to Pittsburgh to extend their dominance after Jagr and Mario. FOH
You can put an end to tanking by abolishing the draft but that will never happen
Tanking is about getting the 1OA, but that's not the goal. The goal is to get THE player.
That significant player(s) is usually found near the top of the draft. But even if you get that gem, you need a team around him to win it all.
It is true that a low percentage of 1OA end up win the cup, it is also true that a low percentage of the teams actually win the cup.
The funniest part of the Sabres is the year they finally get a first overall pick... they get Owen Power hahahahaha
Fk the current lottery system. The Sens ans Red Wings got shafted so hard that the league decided they had to adjust the rules a few years back.
I agree with the commenter who said the top pick should go to the tean that's been the worst over the past 3 seasons. I don't like this draft playoffs idea, but the system the PWHL uses seems reasonable (at least for a league woth 6 teams).
I love how NHL fans (encouraged by Gary Bettman) still think the league’s reward for losing stops at first overall. As though tanking and getting, say, the 3rd overall pick is not still an *incredibly* strong incentive. (And since there is no pro/rel or qualification for side competitions, there is very little incentive to win hockey games on a day-to-day basis if contention, or at least playoffs, seem unlikely).
The lottery should be completely unweighted through all the non-playoff teams (currently the first 16 slots). THAT’s how you preference the weaker ones without incentivizing losing.
Development over drafting. Very few young athletes have the skill set to be competitive in the National league at 18/19. Generally that’s what the first 3 picks guarantee. Beyond that what teams are drafting is POTENTIAL and it’s up to the organization to provide the coaching and training necessary to maximize that potential. Razor thin margins for success.
Just embrace the tank. The tank rules all.
If tanking worked the sabers would have 7 cups
Draft pick playoffs sounds like an amazing idea
I disagree. You're asking players to win a tournament for their team to have the right to draft new players to take their jobs. I would argue the incentive for the players isn't there.
Yea,no. How do free agents factor in? Games will look like all star games because why would any player risk injury,?
I think the NFL is the only major North American sports league where tanking doesn't really happen. Of course there are teams that are bad and know they're bad, but coaches generally do their best to win. There are several notable examples where teams throw away the first overall pick with late week 17 (now week 18) wins
The Edmonton Oilers organization is definitely guilty of this , what was it 4 of 6 season's they scuttled the regular season to get Taylor Hall , Jordan Eberle and others and they lucked out with Golden boy McDavid drawing number 1 when the NHL started the draft lottery. Edmonton should have been disqualified from that lottery. I look forward to Edmonton's downfall in hell.
damn we can already add ekblad to that list :///
Why have a playoff for first overall? The team won't want to win tk have their job taken away.
Another banger video
It's impossible to know. The NHL has changed it's lottery format so many times now that each generation of rebuilding teams faces different rules. The Red Wings, for example, bottomed out at the worst time as far as rules were concerned.. and they paid for it. I think teams tank.. sure. But the reality is that teams go through natural cycles. A long stretch of being competitive and spending assets at the deadline and trading picks for players.. it slowly eats a hole in an organization's depth. That team's core ages, and when they retire.. said team stinks. It's not tanking when that happens.. it's the result of trying to win for a long period of time. So teams like Chicago.. they tanked. But the Sharks?? They aren't tanking, they just stink. That's why I prefer a standard draft. No gimmicks. No lottery.
Tanking is more effective than missing the playoffs by couple points and getting a worse pick with also most likely wasted assets to acquire veteran talent at trade deadline for a playoff push.
This is a good video, but I think it does not acknowledge a harsh reality. You will never eliminate some form of tanking--if we understand it as strategic losing--completely, and I am not sure we should want to eliminate strategic losing. Tanking, or at least losing some margin of games strategically, is always going to be incentivized on some margin in any system where worse teams are given some advantage in drafting. And it is not a bad thing to give worse teams some advantage in drafting to maintain long-term competitive parity. Nobody wants to see a league where, like it was prior to the Salary Cap, only a select few teams every decade have a shot at it, or where it's like college football where the rich just always get richer. So I am fine with accepting that some level of tanking is going to occur in any system if it means better parity. There is an inherent tradeoff between draft systems that improve parity and those that eliminate incentives for tanking.
That does not mean there is not room for improvement over the status quo, but I do not think a competitive playoff for draft picks would ever be introduced for one reason: the players union would view it as a non-starter. I also am not sure it would be a good idea. Sometimes, teams legitimately do become quite bad through the natural process of their core aging. This system would likely create a trap for such teams. Whereas now the worst place to be is the mushy middle, in that system it would incentivize teams to go for the mushy middle. While that is an imporvement on the status quo, it seems unrealitstic and might be too far in the respecting established talent direction.
I think the Gold plan the PWHA has probably strikes the balance between parity and anti-tanking the best. Yes, it would incentivize losing early in the season, but it would make the trade deadline market far more strategically interesting (no more trading away everyone with a pulse if you are a seller), and would provide incentive not to fall below a certain floor of mediocrity else it would make winning late in the season far too hard. Also, it has the bonus of being something the PA could actually get on board with.
I understand the point you're making, and I am a Sharks fan so I might be speaking from a biased POV, however I really think you are looking at this too black and white. True, it has been frustrating living the past 5 years knowing that my hockey team sucks and I shouldn't expect anything from this year, but I know that realistically, this is the best thing we can do to win in the future. Your praise of the '19 Blues, '23 Knights and '07 Ducks is based on the fact that they made incredibly savvy roster moves that got them over the hump, but circumstances such as those are extraordinarily rare and cannot be relied on. Plus, in my opinion, I don't think it's admirable at all to win because you traded for star players, then sports would become a competition of "who is able to make this one trade". You talk about all the teams who have attempted tanking to have it not work, but don't mention the fact that there are far, far more teams that tried to make do with what they had and ended up in a constant state of mediocrity with little to no identity (the Coyotes are a prime example), or that had maybe one or two shots at a cup and came up short, and then had no aspirations for years after because they traded their assets away going all in.
As for tanking itself being bad, I don't love it, but it's undeniably the best path for a franchise when done right. A lot of failed rebuilds that are due to poor management would still be so without tanking, the tanking mentality isn't the problem, management is. But even with tanking rebuilds that fail due to mismanagement, it's still by far the best way to build a winner. There's a reason that the Penguins, Lightning, and Blackhawks have not only been consistently winning cups, but being a mainstay in the playoffs: They built a strong foundation through their draft that keeps them/kept them competitive for over a decade. They won as many cups as they did because they had many, many opportunities. Of course tanking doesn't reliably lead to cups, inherently only 1/32 teams win the cup every year, just because you don't win the cup doesn't mean you failed. Building a team, in my eyes, should be about maximizing your teams odds at winning a championship. Sure, the Blues won in 2019, but they've only had one other fair chance of winning it again since then (2022). The Knights won it last year, but they were a few games away from missing the playoffs the very next year, and it seems like that downward trend is going to continue over the next few years. I think the Blackhawks, Ducks or Sharks are far more likely to win a cup in the next 10 years than the Blues or Knights. As a Sharks fan, I know for a fact that winning now is basically impossible, whether we tank or not, so I'm fine with not paying as much attention and waiting for homegrown players for me to become attached to.
And it does make for bad hockey, but think about the alternatives. The 2nd playoffs, generally speaking would be won by the teams who just barely missed the playoffs, they'd draft good players, and return to the playoffs, knocking down new teams, and the cycle repeats. The teams who are at the bottom (no matter if they're tanking or not, there will be teams that are the worst in the league), have to just hope they hit on picks later in the draft. The same few teams will be in that 11-16th pick range every year, and do not have the resources, present or future, to compete with the teams that are getting the top picks, and no lure for any free agents looking to win a cup. Now THAT would make for disinterested fans. I actually like the gold standard, because it gives us a reason to keep watching and still rooting for our team. I've been rooting for the Sharks to lose any games not against the Knights for years, and of course I'd like to have some time rooting for my team. It's better than the 2nd playoffs because it creates equity for those bottom teams by giving them more time to rack up points.
Sorry for the word bomb, great video, the fact that I had the passion to write a response like this is rare, and you have intrigued me like few others have in the past. Keep up the great work :D
Well said. Your point about a loser cup resulting in the same weak teams getting weaker while the ones who barely missed the wildcard get back into the mix faster is exactly the problem I have with such a solution. A "pity" system of some kind, where teams who have been repeatedly denied 1OA picks or have been constantly leapfrogged have their odds slowly increased would make things a bit more even I think, but wouldn't solve the tanking issue. Not sure what the solution is :/
Well if you have sub par development or bad scouting you kind of have to tank now for new blood. There's no duct taping a team together via free agency like before the cap. Even then you have to have good talent to produce on an entry level contract otherwise you'll have no free cash to add depth to the lineup.
I kind of like the idea of having the NBAs soft cap with luxury tax. Teams that suck could just go for it over the cap if they wanted to with a free agent if the owners had the money. You'd have to have some control so that big money teams wouldn't just buy out everybody but I think it could add some excitement to perennially crappy teams which would mean more revenue for the league and players overall.
The San Jose Sharks never really wanted to tank but were forced to do it because former GM Doug Wilson ran the franchise into the ground.
He "ran it into the ground" because the owner told him he was to do his best to make the playoffs every year. It wasn't until Greer got hired that he said "rebuild" and that was only once at his 1st press conference. But they are going to suffer in their rebuilding because they don't have the high end talent to trade away to get good draft picks and prospects.
such an easy solution to this. pwhl has already figured it out. start accumulating draft points when team is eliminated
Most recent/blatant case was Toronto drafting Marner in 2015, they "decided" to send him back to the OHL's London Knights for another frivolous year. Yet Marner was not able to earn a spot on Toronto's bad roster for the 2015-16 season?
This ensured they were bad enough and in line for Matthews the next draft.
No wonder non Leaf fans detest this franchise.
Marner was the 4th overall pick and most 4th overall picks spend another season in the league they were drafted from to develop
It doesn't. Only if you're certain franchises which get awarded 1st picks by the NHL when you get to a rebuild and there's a generational talent laying around. Basically Chicago and Pittsburgh.
The sabres tanked on purpose got the #2 pick twice then they tanked by accident due to malpractice and got the #1 pick twice. Haven’t made the playoffs still
We don’t talk enough about how they were legitimately trying to win when they ended up with dahlin and power. Probably 2 of the worst coach’s in NHL history
That was good !
The Kings have also never picked first and have been in the league since 1967
Its wierd that in amerikan sports u get rewarded for loosing when in almost all other business it will not give u anything for being bad.
It shouldn’t be too surprising.
We’re AMERICA; LAND OF THE FREE…
PARTICIPATION TROPHIES!
The rangers over here laughing