NHL Draft: We'll Get Back To You
The inimitable Dean Brown has captured the zeitgeist of the Covid-19 hockey draft: “The NHL has pulled off the impossible. Devise a system no one can understand to end up with a winner no one knows.”
Yes, after Friday’s lottery among NHL teams not invited to the Hub Cities Hullabaloo the prize of No. 1 overall pick Alexis LaFreniere is… um, we don’t know yet. Because that team is going to be in the play-in portion of the postseason polka. We won’t know till as late as October who’ll get the latest superstar.
To those trying to understand how this happened it’s not what we don’t know that’s confusing. It’s what we don’t know that we don’t know that has many baffled over how a phantom team will get the top pick.
We do know it won’t be the Detroit Red Wings who laboured long and hard to finish with the worst record in the league at the time Covid-19 struck in March. Actually, they didn’t labour very long or hard to fashion their 17-49-5 record. As a reward for such diligent non-diligence the Red Wings got the worst possible result under the system adopted by the NHL. Fourth place in the distant draft.
Which is like being fourth runner-up at Miss Universe. They’ll get useful player, but no one to resurrect the once-great franchise that made the playoffs 30 times in 32 seasons, including 25-straight from 1990–91 to 2015–16. So expect them to do another tank job next season to improve their lot. If at first you don’t succeed…
While we are being cranky over this, let’s give the NHL credit for designing a draft system— any draft system— while the other leagues cowered in their basements. As we said before, Gary Bettman and innovation are rarely partners in a sentence. In an unprecedented time, with no examples, they took a stab at it.
And wounded themselves. Are the eight mediocre teams who can still draft young star LaFreniere really going to go all-out against better teams in the play-in round and blow the chance to get him? Imagine Montreal losing a shot at a French Canadian star by winning the first round then getting destroyed in the regular playoffs.
Well, what can you do? You wanted hockey, you’re getting hockey.
Funny we should mention hockey re-starting. Despite the NHL’s insistence that this truncated 2019-20 season have a conclusion there are still some hurdles to overcome. Such as the identity of a Canadian hub city to host the teams playing for the Stanley Cup. Vancouver seems to have cooled on the idea, leaving Toronto and Edmonton as reluctant suitors for the event.
And there’s no clarity on just what to make of the latest statistics from Covid testing. Because the winner so far this season is the virus. Fanned by a panic-stricken media, it has scared the be-jaysus out of everyone so much that we collapsed the economy. It has separated the public into two camps on masks. It has created a cottage industry of fake news and hopeful developments.
The latest stumbling block is the nagging number of positives from athletes and support staff in sports just getting re-started. As testing gears up the news is redolent with the latest star who has tested positive— many of them in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Which shouldn’t be surprising coming out of a quarantine where people could not develop immunity to Covid and other viruses.
Now they’re back in society, and— shocking too those who believed flattening the curve meant destroying the virus— Covid is still out there. Thus far none of these high-profile athletes or staff has even been hospitalized or developed serious symptoms. Which is in keeping with the research showing the virus being lethal almost exclusively to people over 70 or with underlying medical conditions.
A healthy 20-something NHL star in shape from the season is going to have the immune system to knock down the virus with little or no effect. But the high improbability of catching something worse still leaves players and the league in terror. Headlines about “blood on their hands” haunt them.
So here’s what we know for sure today about getting camps re-started. Crickets. It’s all in the hands of mayors and health officials who could shut down the re-opening overnight if they are concerned. The NHL will hold its lotteries, issue press releases and suggest hub cities.
But everything after that is a crapshoot. Just ask the Red Wings.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his next book Personal Account with Tony Comper will be available on BruceDowbigginBooks.ca this fall.