The Deep Dive. Inside the NHL Entry Draft Lottery
Odds. Hockey Prospects in History. How do National
Hockey League franchises build championship -winning
teams? In this deep dive, we unpack the fascinating
evolution and complex mechanics of the NHL Entry
Draft. From the controversial C -forms of the
1960s to the modern, high -stakes NHL Draft Lottery,
we explore how hockey prospects transition from
amateurs to pros. Whether you are curious about
the shifting draft lottery odds, The history
of the NHL amateur draft. or the league's new
decentralized draft model, this deep dive breaks
down the ultimate system of professional sports
talent acquisition. Perfect for curious learners
looking to understand the business and strategy
behind the ice. Welcome to a brand new deep dive.
And today we are looking at something that, well,
on the surface might just look like a standard
sporting event to you. Right, a bunch of teenagers
putting on oversized jerseys. Exactly, taking
photos, shaking hands. But when you really pull
back the curtain, it's so much more than that.
We're talking about the NHL Entry Draft. Which
is really a mess. of business operation. It is.
We want to reframe this for you, not just as
a photo op, but as a high stakes, multimillion
dollar corporate talent acquisition machine.
It's this wild system that relies on intense
years long scouting mixed with, and I mean this,
quite literally bouncing ping pong balls. To
determine the future of billion dollar franchises.
Yes. It's a great way to look at it because.
At its core, this entire system we're exploring
today is fundamentally about one thing, and that
is creating parity. Right. In a hyper -competitive
league, you need a mechanism to ensure that the
worst teams have a fighting chance to get better.
You can't just have the best teams monopolizing
all the elite talent forever. The rich just getting
richer. Exactly. The draft is essentially the
engine of hope for these franchises. And it is
an engine with a really incredibly complex history.
Today, we're pulling our facts from a comprehensive
Wikipedia breakdown of the NHL entry draft. A
lot of ground to cover there. A ton. Our mission
for this deep dive is to map out how this draft
evolved from a very quiet, closed -door, and
frankly controversial hotel meeting into a massive
televised spectacle. And decoding the math. Oh,
the math behind the draft lottery itself. We
are definitely getting into that. It's just wild
when you think about it that the entire future
of a city's sports dominance can hinge entirely
on picking an 18 -year -old kid. It really can.
Okay, let's unpack this. Where does this whole
system even begin? Because, uh... There wasn't
always a draft, right? Right. If we go back to
the era before 1963, the draft as we know it
today just did not exist. Not at all. Not at
all. Instead, the league operated under what
was known as the sponsorship era. It was a completely
different landscape. How did that work? Well,
NHL teams simply sponsored junior hockey teams
across the country. They essentially funded these
amateur clubs, paid the bills, and in return...
They just owned the players. Basically, yes.
They got the exclusive rights to the players
on those rosters. Which, I mean, sounds simple
enough on paper, but looking at our source material,
it seems like it was essentially the Wild West.
Oh, it was. To secure these players, NHL teams
were using this system of A, B, and C forms.
And this is where things get really controversial,
specifically with the C -form. Yes, the notorious
C -form. This was a document that a teenager,
or more accurately their parents since they were
minors, could sign. Right, you have a 14 -year
-old kid. Exactly. And if you signed a C -form,
the professional team that held that form owned
your professional rights entirely by the time
you turned 18. Wow. You were locked in. There
was no shopping around, no leverage to negotiate,
no choice in the matter whatsoever. Imagine that
today. For you listening, imagine you're 14 or
15 years old, you sign a piece of paper, and
your entire professional future is just handed
over to one single corporation. It wouldn't fly
today. No. Obviously this angered a lot of parents.
The Wikipedia outline notes that this practice
led to serious threats of legal action against
the NHL. People were fed up. The pressure from
parents and this looming threat of lawsuits ultimately
forced the league's hand to change the system
entirely. By 1967. But they actually started
the transition a bit earlier than that, didn't
they? They did. The very first iteration of the
draft actually took place on June 5th, 1963.
And you really have to picture the contrast to
today's events. It wasn't in a giant arena. Not
at all. Today we see arenas packed with thousands
of screaming fans, live national television broadcasts,
immense production value. But that first draft
in 63, it took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel
in Montreal. So just a quiet closed door administrative
meeting. Literally just executives sitting around
the conference table. In a smoky room, probably.
Yeah. Looking over typed lists of names. Purely
an administrative function. And for the record,
the very first pick ever in that 1963 draft was
a player named Gary Monahan. Gary Monahan. Yes.
Selected by the Montreal Canadiens. The ultimate
trivia answer. But even then, the system wasn't
really fully formed yet. It took competition
to really force the NHL into the modern era,
didn't it? It did. Because in the 1970s, a rival
league emerged called the World Hockey Association.
The WHA. And the WHA changed everything. Suddenly,
the NHL did not have a monopoly on professional
hockey in North America. They had real competition.
Fierce competition. The WHA was aggressive. They
were willing to pay big money. And more importantly,
they were willing to sign younger players. Poaching
the talent. Exactly. This intense rivalry forced
the NHL to adapt quickly. In 1974, just to prevent
the WHA from grabbing all the top young talent,
the NHL temporarily lowered their draft. age
down to 18. It was an absolute arms race for
teenagers. It really was. And it completely shifted
the dynamic. Eventually, the WHA folded in 1979
and the NHL ended up absorbing its remaining
teams and players. Right. The merger. But the
impact of that rivalry permanently changed the
draft. That same year, 1979, the league officially
changed the name from the NHL Amateur Draft to
the NHL Entry Draft. Subtle but important change.
Yeah. And they solidified the eligibility age
rules to include 18 to 20 -year -olds and up
to 21 for non -North American players. That name
change you mentioned is actually highly significant.
From amateur to entry. Yes. Changing it reflected
the new reality. Players were coming from various
leagues, some having already played professionally
in Europe or even in the WHA itself. Ah, so they
weren't really amateurs anymore. Exactly. It
was no longer just about drafting strictly amateur
players. It was the entry point into the NHL
ecosystem for any new talent. Okay, so the foundation
is laid. We have moved out of the sponsorship
era. We survived the legal threats over the C
-forms and outlasted the WHA. A lot of growing
pains. Definitely. Now, let's look at how this
administrative hotel meeting stepped into the
spotlight and became a massive public spectacle.
The transformation into a true event really started
hitting its milestones in the 1980s. The first
major shift was simply opening the doors to the
public. Letting the fans in. Right. That happened
in 1980, fittingly at the Montreal Forum, allowing
fans to actually come in, sit in the stands,
and watch the process happen live. And once you
have a live audience, television is not far behind.
In 1984, the draft had its first live television
broadcast on the CBC. The huge step. Huge. And
then the next year, 1985, they finally took the
show on the road. The draft was held outside
of Montreal for the very first time, taking place
in Toronto. Breaking that Montreal tradition.
Yeah. And continuing that expansion, they held
the first U .S.-hosted draft in Detroit in 1987.
By moving it around, the NHL basically turned
the draft into a traveling roadshow. Like a circus
coming to town. Exactly. It became a marquee
event on the sporting calendar, a real way to
engage different fan bases and build immense
hype around incoming players in their own cities.
And the hype is justified when you look at the
absolute legends who have walked across that
stage as number one overall picks. The names
are staggering. Just looking at the data from
our sources, these are names that completely
redefine the modern era of the sport. You have
Mario Lemieux in 1984. Generational. Fast forward
a bit. You get Alexander Ovechkin in 2004, followed
immediately by Sidney Crosby in 2005. Back -to
-back drafts. And most recently, the massive
phenomenon of Conor Bedard in 2023. These aren't
just good players. These are franchise -altering...
generational talents. What's fascinating here
is that just as the draft reached its absolute
peak as a massive in -person arena spectacle,
the league decided to pivot completely. Just
recently, right? Yes. In October 2023, the NHL
made a monumental decision to switch to a decentralized
draft model. Starting very soon. Which will officially
begin in 2025. A decentralized draft. Explain
to the listener what that actually looks like
on the ground. Well, if you picture a recent
NHL draft, you see the arena floor completely
covered with massive tables. Dozens of them.
Every single team has a table, and all their
executives, general managers, and scouts are
crowded around it, whispering, making frantic
phone calls, glaring at the tables next to them.
You can cut the tension with a knife. Under the
new decentralized model, all of that disappears.
There are no more executives crowded on the draft
floor. Where are they? The team representatives
will operate remotely from their own home front
offices. The top prospects will still attend
the event in person to walk the stage, but the
teams stay home. So essentially, it will mirror
what you see in the NFL and the NBA drafts. Exactly.
The general manager is sitting in a high -tech
war room back in their home city rather than
sitting at a folding table on an ice rink floor.
Precisely. It changes the logistics completely.
It removes the immediate face -to -face interaction
between rival executives during the draft itself.
No more marching over to the other table to make
a trade. No. It is a massive shift in how the
business of the draft is conducted. Okay, so
we have the history and the setting. Let's dive
into the actual mechanics of hope. The rules.
Yes, how a team gets their hands on a player
like Sidney Crosby or Conor Bedard. How does
the selection order actually work? Because it
is not just pulled out of a hat. No, it's a very...
very specific hierarchy designed, as we mentioned
earlier, to help the weakest teams first. The
draft order is determined in reverse order of
the regular season standings, but it has several
distinct tiers based on playoff performance.
Let's break that math down for you. There are
32 teams in the NHL. The first 16 picks, picks
1 through 16, are reserved for the non -playoff
teams. The ones who went home early. Right. The
teams that missed the postseason entirely get
the first crack at the best talent. Then we move
to the playoff teams. The teams that made the
playoffs but lost early pick next. Making sense
so far. Then come the division winners who didn't
make it to the conference finals. Then the conference
final losers. The team that loses the Stanley
Cup final gets picked number 31. Almost last.
And finally, the Stanley Cup champion picks dead
last at number 32. It's a logical progression.
It's rewarding failure with future potential
and punishing success with a harder path to new
top -tier talent. The ultimate balancing act.
But within this structured math, there is a very
interesting quirk regarding compensatory picks.
Yes. This jumped out at me from the Wikipedia
source, and it is a rule that will definitely
intrigue you. It's a great safety net. Let's
say your favorite team has a terrible year. They
get a first -round pick. They select a highly
touted 18 -year -old. And everyone is thrilled.
The future is bright. But then, negotiations
stall. The team fails to sign that first -round
player to a contract. What happens? Do they just
lose that critical asset entirely? In many systems,
yes, they would just be out of luck. Tough break.
But the NHL has a safeguard. If a team drafts
a first -round player but fails to sign him,
they are awarded a compensatory draft pick. And
the placement of this pick is fascinating. They
get a pick in the exact same numerical slot,
but in the second round of the very next year's
draft. So if you fail to sign the seventh overall
pick in the first round this year, next year
the league hands you the seventh pick of the
second round. Think about relating this to your
own workplace. Imagine you are running a company.
And you spend months recruiting to hire a top
C -suite executive. You make the offer. They
agree. But at the last minute, they walk away
and refuse to sign the employment contract. A
disaster for the company. Total disaster. But
instead of just leaving you empty -handed and
desperate, your HR department steps in and says,
don't worry, because that fell through. We are
giving you an automatic guaranteed backup hire
for a senior director role next year. It's incredible.
It is an incredible safety net for a billion
dollar business. It absolutely is. And it prevents
a franchise from being completely devastated
by a single contract dispute with an 18 year
old. It maintains that baseline of parity we
keep talking about. Which brings us to the ultimate
tool of parity and arguably the most nerve wracking
part of the entire process. The ping pong balls.
The lottery. Why do we even need a lottery? For
a long time, the absolute worst team in the league
just. automatically got the first overall pick,
right? They did. Up until 1994, it was purely
based on the standings. Finish last, pick first.
Simple. But the league recognized a fatal flaw
in that system, the incentive to lose. Right.
If a generational talent is available, a team
having a bad season might decide to intentionally
lose games down the stretch to guarantee they
finish dead last. This is commonly known as tanking.
Exactly, tanking. And it compromises the integrity
of the sport if teams are actively trying to
lose. Fans hate it. So to prevent tanking, the
NHL introduced the draft lottery in 1995. But
the rules of this lottery have not been static
at all. Constant changes. Walk us through the
dizzying changes to these rules over the years,
because it really shows how the NHL is constantly
tweaking the system, trying to find the perfect
mathematical balance. It really has been a constant
evolution, a real trial and error process. Let's
look at the first era of the lottery from 1995
to 2012. OK. During this time, a team could win
the lottery. but they could only move up a maximum
of four spots in the draft order. So if you finished
as the eighth worst team and won the lottery,
the highest you could pick was fourth. You couldn't
jump all the way to number one, which still heavily
favored the absolute worst team. Right. But then
we hit the chaotic era from 2013 to 2015. They
changed it so that any lottery winner automatically
got the number one overall pick, regardless of
where they finished in the non -playoff standings.
Exactly. You could be the team that... just barely
missed the playoffs by one single point, win
the lottery, and suddenly leapfrog everybody
to take the number one overall superstar. Pure
chaos. It was pure chaos. So they adjusted again.
From 2015 to 2020, they introduced a system where
they pulled three separate lottery winners for
the top three picks. The league is just constantly
turning the dials, trying to figure out how to
be fair without incentivizing bad behavior. And
sometimes overcorrecting. That brings us to the
current system. which was implemented in 2022
and runs to the present day. What are the modern
rules? The current rules are quite strict. First,
they went back to a limit on how far you can
jump. The two lottery winners can now only move
up a maximum of 10 places in the draft order.
So if you are the 14th worst team and you win
the lottery, you only move up to pick number
four. Correct. You cannot get the number one
pick. This means, mathematically, only the 11
worst teams in the league actually have a shot
at the number one overall pick. That's right.
And they added an even more severe safeguard,
which is the two and five rule. I love this rule.
Emphasize this for us. The two and five rule
states that a single franchise can only advance
in the draft order by winning the lottery a maximum
of twice in any five year span. So no dynasties
of losing. Exactly. If you have already won the
lottery twice in the last five years, you are
essentially locked out from jumping up again.
It prevents one perpetually bad team from hoarding
all the lottery luck year after year. It forces
teams to actually build a team rather than just
relying on ping pong balls to bail them out of
bad management. Precisely. And let's ground this
discussion with the exact odds of the current
system because they are stark. Under these modern
rules, the absolute worst team in the NHL, the
team that suffered through the most miserable
season, only has an 18 .5 % chance of winning
the number one pick. Not very high. Conversely,
the best non -playoff team, the team sitting
at spot number 16, has less than a 1 % chance.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, you
can see how these specific odds and limits fundamentally
alter franchise strategy. How so? As a general
manager, you have to carefully weigh the risks.
Is it worth dismantling your roster, trading
away good veteran players, and subjecting your
fans to a miserable 82 game season? A completely
unwatchable product. Yes. all to chase a roughly
one in five chance at a superstar. Because an
18 .5 % chance is nowhere near a guarantee. It's
a huge risk. You are taking a massive gamble
with your entire organization's culture for an
81 .5 % chance of not getting the number one
pick. Exactly. The lottery math forces front
offices to realize that tanking is no longer
a guaranteed strategy. You have to find other
ways to build. Okay, let's unpack this. So what
does this all mean? The big takeaway. Yes. When
we step back and look at the entire journey of
the NHL entry draft, we see that it has evolved
from a quiet, closed -door hotel meeting in 1963
designed to stop legal threats from angry parents
over indentured servant -style C -forms to this
highly regulated, mathematically complex, televised
global event. It proves that sports leagues are
essentially massive living ecosystems. They require
constant obsessive rule tweaking just to maintain
a fragile balance of fairness, and more importantly,
to ensure there is always hope for every single
fan base. The draft is the mechanism that keeps
the league alive. It is the annual reset button.
Before we wrap up, I want to leave you with a
final thought to mull over. We talked about the
shift coming in 2025, where the NHL is moving
to a decentralized draft. Teams will stay in
their home cities. The general managers will
be in high -tech war rooms looking at screens
instead of sitting at folding tables on an arena
floor. I want you to consider what happens to
the psychology of the draft when we make that
change. It's a profound shift. For decades, the
draft floor was a pressure cooker. General managers
were sitting 20 feet away from each other. They
could glare at each rival. read their body language,
and make spontaneous, emotionally charged blockbuster
trades right there in person while the clock
was ticking down. You could feel the energy in
the building. Without that physical proximity.
Without being trapped in the same room under
the hot arena lights, does the draft lose its
human element? It's a fair question. Will these
remote calculated spreadsheet driven front office
decisions ultimately remove the dramatic emotional
mistakes and spontaneous risks that make sports
history so entertaining in the first place? It
is something to think about the next time you
watch a team go on the clock. Definitely. Thank
you for joining this deep dive. Keep questioning
how things work and keep exploring the hidden
systems behind the things you love.