…even if it costs Lysell+? Lysell isn’t that good lol. 1st+Lysell+Lohrei is the best package they can put together and that probably doesn’t cut it for Meier. Bruins would be looking at Lysell+multiple 1sts, or including a guy like DeBrusk.

I think Lysell has the potential to be a high end top 6 winger who impacts the game in all 3 zones. I think he’s the best prospects that could he had out of the rumored prospects that are realistic in a Meier package

Honestly they should be.

I was multitasking or I’d have given a better response with quality of opposition and such, but would have had to change my monitor and it was on the Leafs game.

Regardless, he has to deal with Crosby, Aho, Larkin, etc and all the elite defensemen who get protection and offensive zone starts for 2 1/2 periods every night. It’s a miserable job. You do all that work then coach doesn’t give you power play time, and you’re maybe benched the last few minutes of the game while Frankenstein of the top 6 is on the ice, and you never really get interviews or sponsors because you are only .5ppg. Then -if- you get good at it, we’ll now you’re stuck there and won’t get a top 6 role, because it’s so valuable to the team.

It shouldn’t be pretty. But to do that then tilt the ice for your team is a giant boost.

The other guys don’t have to deal with the worst because you did. They can start in the offensive zone and beat on the other teams second line.

My favorite selke skater maybe was Michael handzus. That dude did this job perfectly. Get the puck, take it to their end, cycle it until it’s time to change lines, let your team score. Repeat times 82. Bergeron is way better than Handzus of course, but Bergeron (and Kopitar) are unique in so many ways.

I’m also a weirdo who doesn’t care much about offensive stats for the Norris. Well, they shouldn’t be the primary factor. I’m weird. Also, the selke has to be a center because defense is baked into that role. Wingers back and forecheck but the center is basically the 3rd defenseman in the neutral zone.

And to highlight, he does all that and has only 10 penalty minutes. That’s just nutty. No trips or hooks or interferences because he lost a battle. Just elite.

I wonder if Bettman can ever fix tanking.

I was just thinking: drafting first overall, especially when there is a clear cut top center at the very top, has to be worth over 100 million dollars. Between merchandise, advertising, attendance - I mean it’s fair to say whichever owner retains the rights to Connor Bedard is probably guaranteed 100 million dollars or more in additional profit over the next 10 years. Maybe double that.

Bettman should embrace the tank.

Wait, what?

Yes.

How?

Have a tournament during the Stanley cup playoffs where the winner gets the first overall pick. All the losers play a best of 3 series in bracket style. “Doesn’t that hurt the worst teams?” My response - Are they the worst teams because being the worst has benefits now? Draft picks go in order of elimination from said tournament. If you get blown out in round one, enjoy pick 16. Be better at hockey. 16 isn’t trash.

This would make the league more competitive on any given regular season night. Stop rewarding failure. Soccer teams get relegated, not 100 million dollars. The worst team in the league shouldn’t get rewarded more than the cup winner. A cup is priceless, but from an owners perspective it sure as hell isn’t worth 100 mil.

Balancing for parity is in the league's best interest.
Most major Soccer leagues have a handful of teams that dominate the league every year.
Most those countries have little in terms of competition for fans.
In North America, we have Football, Baseball, Basketball, etc.
If we want to compete with those other leagues, we need viable teams in every market.


I think a more simple change would be to change the lottery odds to use 2-year or 3-year records to spread the chances across the 16 non-playoffs teams (most recent year still getting heaviest weight).

Example...Team A is a team trying to compete, team B is Tanking for the pick

Team A: 32nd place in year1, 26th place in year2...reward improves (instead of 7th best lottery odds, they get 4th best)
Team B: 20th place in year1, 30th place in year2...reward drops (instead of 3rd best lottery odds, they get 8th best)

yeah but when you swap Romanov with Mayfield you get ton of HITZZZZZ

I hope they finish 13th last

Without barzal they might lose the rest of their games

This is by far the worst top 12 in the NHL

Having a tournament for who gets 1 OA is counter-intuitive, 1 OA would pretty much always go to teams around like 25 then

I wonder which team will trade for Scott mayfield

I wonder how many teams who are bad right now would instead be competitive. Right now the biggest reward (priceless Stanley cup aside) given during 2023 goes to the (lottery) biggest loser.

I wonder if teams would approach the season and their rosters differently if they knew that being good had a reward, even if that didn’t mean playoff contention.

It would probably also raise the value of depth players a ton. And career AHLers.

Edit: this would force improvement instead of reward it.

I get the parity side, but when a team like Arizona is known for taking retired player contracts just to meet the cap floor, there’s already a parity issue.

They've already taken steps with lottery restrictions and odds. Maybe they don't go far enough, but there's still no incentive to hold onto expiring assets at the trade deadline if you are projecting to be out of the playoff picture. The only way to deter tanking outside of the lottery, is to push the "finish line" further into the season to reduce the number of teams engaging in roster deconstruction at the deadline.

The cap helps with parity and is supposed to make teams closer in terms of ability to compete, so that there is a lot of potential for movement in the standings until the last possible minute. The sooner the games cease to matter, the less engagement and more teams drop out of even attempting to overcome a standings deficit.

You could set the lotto positions at an earlier date and then have odds adjust based on performance from that point. Rewarding teams that are still fighting to compete with better odds, while those that "embrace the tank" see their odds reduced, and/or you could just have a full lottery instead of 2 picks and/or make the difference in odds less substantial so there's less of a fight to be the worst.

The cap needs to apply equally to all teams before any of that really matters however. You can't have exchange rates, different tax rules, LTIR shenanigans, etc. and expect a level playing field.
You also can't have a continuous stream of "cap dump" contracts floating around the league. Maybe lower term to 5 years, don't allow contracts to extend through 35 years old, give teams less cap penalties for buyouts, etc.
You can't have Canadian funds propping up a team like Arizona, while Florida and Tampa are getting players at a discount because of no state tax. That's not a level playing field. Every player should be getting the same take home portion of their contract regardless of where they are playing.

The schedule isn't balanced either, intentionally to highlight "rivalries", so not everyone is facing the same quality of competition. You'll never have parity if teams aren't playing each other an equal number of times.

Your point about exchange rates/taxation and such is very powerful as well as the schedule imbalances. My idea would essentially doom the places who are on the downside of that unevenness.

Plus with my silly idea there would be no fun trade deadline to speculate on and I’d lose one of my favorite things to do 😃

Is it good for the league, and for hockey in general, if Bedard ends up in Columbus, Anaheim, or Arizona? From a fan's perspective, I'd rather see him in a bigger market like VAN or MTL, but their fans will spend money regardless. I'm sure Bettman wants his small market teams to be competitive, but from a marketability standpoint, Bedard would look great on the cover of NHL25 in a Habs, Canucks, or even Sharks sweater.

I get what you're saying but I don't see it.
Gretzky basically created an entirely new market for the NHL in Los Angeles.
Iirc a similar thing could be said with Lemieux's and Crosby's impact on the Penguins.

Many American hockey markets strike me as being majorly populated by fair-weather supporters.
Revenues for Arizona and their profitability was actually quite good back when they managed to make the playoffs somewhat consistently, say nothing of the level of support the Yotes got for their ECF run back in 2012.
Same can be said for places like Columbus, Vegas, Raleigh and Tampa.

As you say, I don't think any Canadian market has these issues.
I believe Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver are always gonna have a very high floor of fan engagement.

I think the best outcome for growing the sport would be for Bedard to end up with the Yotes, Sharks, Ducks or Blue Jackets rather than the Canucks or Blackhawks.

It'd just put the awful teams into a spiral, fringe teams would just miss the playoffs to win this tournament and get a solid player on an ELC.

Just defers the tank from awful teams to fringe teams

I think that the idea of Gold Drafting is a really clever way to keep the draft functioning as intended, where the worst teams get better picks, while also vastly reducing the incentive for a GM to tank, because the team still needs to win in order to get a high draft pick. Unlike a draft lottery playoff, where all teams start on equal footing which favours the better teams in the playoff, Gold drafting kinda balances itself by giving the very worst teams a head start, leading to them often getting the best draft picks.

this made my day :'D

It doesn't really work well, especially since no players actually loses on purpose, telling bad teams to win in order to get a better pick simply defeats the reason the team is bad, they're bad because they lose so much and now they need to win games to get a lottery pick, still counter-intuitive

The NHL is balanced enough and luck-based enough that the massive head start afforded to teams that are really bad and get eliminated super-early counters the quality difference, and the worst teams still pick high because they have much longer to accumulate points after elimination, whereas teams that are in the playoff hunt, or get eliminated with only a week or so left, cannot make up the difference.

The entire premise works but it would be a marketing nightmare. Keeping track of Gold Points would excite only the most hardcore of fans and this would make the NHL the only professional league where the best pick isn't necessarily going to the worst team (lotteries aside). Likewise, teams would simultaneously be trying to get mathematically eliminated as fast as possible then win the remainder of their games, and I could see a strategy of going 0-40 to start a season creep out from under the floorboards (but hey, they were above .500 for the rest of the season, finishing 24-58 to end the season!). You probably end up with a few more trades at the start of the year but I don't think FA's would be extremely excited to sign with a perpetually bad team knowing that they weren't going to start seriously winning games until January.

I genuinely think the solution is for the league to both embrace tanking, but punish it at the same time. Bump the number of retention slots to 6 (keep the 15% cap ceiling though) and start punishing teams for being perpetually bad.

1. Teams can no longer string consecutive seasons below a threshold (say .500; last year's median for points was .555)
2. Draft picks are forfeit depending on how much you miss the threshold by and are then put into a lottery for the teams that met or exceeded the threshold (say for every .050 interval and every year below threshold the forfeited pick increases a round)

Teams are going to have bum years from time to time and I think punishing those teams just plagued by happenstance isn't the way to approach the problem. It's the perpetually bad that need to be weeded out and if contraction isn't an option then pulling from that club's draft capital becomes precedent. But by expanding the retention slots, those teams looking to go firesale are given more opportunity to rake in more draft capital in one fell swoop. Clubs are possibly less afraid of multi-year retention eating up a third of these slots as they'll still have more to work with than they otherwise would have.

I think the salary cap would need to at least have a much more consistent regularity to how much it rises per annum before any system was implemented though.

I'd say...

Yea: ARI, ANA
Nay: CBJ, PHI
D/K: STL, VAN, SJS

I would worry a bit about the optics on him going to a team that is obvious seller at deadline.

But whoever gets him has earned it

I don't think that punishing teams for being perpetually bad actually fixes anything, and makes the problem worse because you'd be taking away the main way of building a prospect pool. Let's look at the Red Wings as an example.

0.482 points% in 2016-17 (no penalty)
0.445 points% in 2017-18 (lose a 6th round pick because they were below the threshold for a second straight year and below .450)
0.451 points% in 2018-19 (lose a 6th round pick because they were below the threshold for a third straight year)
0.275 points% in 2019-20 (lose their first pick because they were below .300 and losing record for a fourth straight year)
0.429 points% in 2020-21 (lose their 2rd round pick for having a losing record in 5 straight years and being below .450)
0.451 points% in 2021-22 (lose their 2nd round pick for having a losing record in 6 straight years)

And what of Buffalo in the past decade, or Carolina under Karmanos? Incompetent/cheap ownership aside, long rebuilds like Detroit is just coming out of or Pittsburgh is going to need to begin very soon are a part of the league, and even taking lower picks away greatly hinders the chances of finding a Jaccob Slavin or Connor Hellebuyck to help end the rebuild. More retention slots is an unrelated issue, but I agree that there should be more than 3 slots to encourage trading high-money players.