The Detroit Red Wings Deserve To Benefit From The NHL Draft Lottery.
As the NHL Draft potentially looms as one of the major storylines of a sports-starved summer, draft storylines will begin to take shape as the days get longer and hotter. One of the most contentious of these storylines will be the process by which the order of teams picking is determined. Like the NBA, the NHL uses a lottery system, where the teams that missed the postseason are given weighted odds of getting the first overall pick based on their records at the end of the season.
The problem that arises is that the NHL regular season was not entirely completed, and likely will not be, as the league gravitates towards a playoff format with up to 24 of the league’s 31 teams participating in a round-robin tournament before moving on to elimination in later rounds. In addition, the league has proposed changes to the lottery system from the format that has been used since 2013. And no one should be more pleased by these developments than fans of the Detroit Red Wings.
The Red Wings’ paused season was well on its way to being one of, if not the worst in modern NHL history. Their lottery odds would already have been one of the best, however that would have only maximized their chances of winning the top pick at 18 percent. However, under the revamped lottery proposal, the Wings would be, at worst, guaranteed the second overall pick. This would ensure that they would get the opportunity to pick one of the top two prospects in the draft, left winger Alexis Lafrenière and center Quinton Byfield.
Detractors of this proposal would argue that this defeats the entire purpose of the lottery in the first place. After all, it was designed to prevent teams from stooping to new lows in their on-ice product and then being rewarded with the first overall pick for their trouble. We saw this system work as intended in the 2015 NHL Draft, when the Buffalo Sabres blatantly tanked to maximize their chances of picking Connor McDavid, the most hyped NHL prospect since Sidney Crosby entered the league in 2005.
However, their efforts were not rewarded as the lottery instead awarded the top pick to the Edmonton Oilers, while the Sabres had to settle for 2nd- still enough to get Jack Eichel, who has blossomed into a top player in his own right, but not the same caliber of player as McDavid. It was the classic example of the system working as intended, to foil a team that was deliberately putting the worst product possible in front of their fans.
However, the Red Wings have, for most of their recent history, behaved the opposite way as Buffalo. They famously made the Stanley Cup playoffs for twenty-five straight seasons between 1991 and 2016, the longest such streak in all of North American professional sports. During that time, they built multiple incarnations of their dynasty in a variety of different ways- using expert scouting to find star players like Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg late in the draft, but also spending money to bring in star veteran free agents like Brett Hull and Dominik Hasek. They were the model NHL franchise in almost every respect, and their fans loved them for it.
When the streak came to an end, it was not for the Red Wings’ lack of effort to field a competitive team- quite the opposite, in fact. In a bid to keep the streak going, the team traded away young players and first round draft picks to continue adding tested veterans, a move that ultimately came back to haunt them.
Some infamous examples included trading away a first round draft pick in 2012 that the Tampa Bay Lightning (with Red Wings legend Steve Yzerman serving as their GM) used to select goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, who at just twenty-five years old has already blossomed into one of the league’s best goalies. Meanwhile, one of the main reasons why the Red Wings had such a poor season this year was goaltending play, as onetime stalwart Jimmy Howard was easily the worst netminder in the league to start regularly.
Even during this disastrous season, the Red Wings did trade established players like Andreas Athanasiou for future draft picks, but they also did make moves to improve their current roster, such as trading with the St. Louis Blues for Robby Fabbri. Fabbri, a talented young forward who has struggled to realize his potential so far due to injury, has played well in Detroit so far, although he However, one cannot deny that that approach was literally the opposite of tanking, one that deserves to be karmically rewarded in lottery odds.
Unfortunately for the Red Wings, karma has not been on their side in the draft lottery during the past few seasons. In 2018, they dropped back in the lottery from the fifth position in the draft order to sixth, and in 2019 they dropped back from fourth to sixth. Had they won the lottery in either season, they could have taken a possible future superstar and face of the franchise- Swede Rasmus Dahlin (perhaps the most highly rated defensive prospect to enter the league in a decade) in 2018 or homegrown Michigan center Jack Hughes in 2019.
The players the Red Wings did end up drafting from those years, Czech winger Filip Zadina and German defenseman Moritz Seider, both show a great deal of promise yet, but neither have established themselves in the league the way that Hughes and especially Dahlin have. Alexis Lafreniere, however, is exactly the kind of player who could have that impact on the Red Wings right away, and begin to turn their fortunes around.
One does not have to be a fan of the Red Wings to see that for a quarter century, they were the model for how to run a sports franchise, and tried to do right by their fans for as long as they possibly could. Steve Yzerman has now returned to the Red Wings as General Manager, and his plan to rebuild the franchise is only beginning to take shape. However, a little luck could come in handy, and the NHL’s draft lottery working out in favor of one of the league’s great franchises is only good for the sport as a whole.
