I have an idea to try and shrink the time it takes to get the worst teams in the league back to playoff contention. The idea would be to...
-reduce the draft lottery to the bottom five teams (all with equal chance to win)
-give the team who wins the draft lottery the first two picks.
-the team that wins the lottery does not get a first round pick in the next years draft.
-expansion team gets first picks
Unless you are running into years where it is a drastically bad draft this puts any team who wins a clear path towards a competitive team in the next few years and keeps fan bases of the worst teams excited for whats to come. Just going back to the Mcdavid Draft.
Oilers get Mcdavid and Eichel
Mapleleafs get Mathews and Laine
Devils getting Hischier and Patrick/makar (weak draft year)
Sabres getting Dahlin and Svechnikov (weak draft year)
Devils get Hughes and Kakko
Rangers get Lafreniere and Byfield
Kraken get Power and Beniers
Montreal takes Wright/Cooley and Slafkovsky
Chicago takes Beddard and Carlsson
Only Devils won it twice and they'd be Cup contenders with these players. Anaheim is probably next on this list and adding a first and second overall to them makes them Cup Contenders. Or a team like San Jose it puts back towards contention. It also puts two future big dollar players on teams who win.
Thoughts?
Proposal 1 easy pass, I don’t see why equal odds make sense and the lottery is already fairly limited ( only 1-11 can get 1 OA )
Proposal 2 makes about 0 sense, the team that wins the lottery that year likes that but about no one else in the league will
Proposal 3 would stop teams from perpetually tanking but I’d argue tanking for a couple years back to back is necessary for a good rebuild
Proposal 4 I’d be fine with
Perhaps Lottery odds should be equally affected by standings and game attendance. Tanking teams would have to at least try to be entertaining to help their odds.
I would balance this by letting teams rollover accrued cap space for up to 3 years so they can "overspend" to make a run. Caveat would be that it cannot be used on LTIR cap space.