I breathed a sigh of relief when I found out that I was wrong about the NHL draft lottery. They just announced how it's gonna go down.
It isn't the case that every team has an equal chance, as I previously thought. Every team has achance. An article on ESPN.com enlightened me about it. Essentially, all 30 teams have at least one ball in the lottery. Ten teams will have two, and the Rangers, Sabres, Penguins and Blue Jackets have three balls a piece.
The way this was determined was a complicated matrix involving the number of playoff appearances over the past three years and number of #1 picks over the past four years.
What does it mean?
The Ducks, Thrashers, Flames, 'Canes, Blackhawks, Oilers, Kings, Wild, Preds and Coyotes have a 4.17% chance of getting the kid.
The Rangers, Penguins, Sabres, and Blue Jackets are feeling good with a 6.25% chance each.
Those other schmucks still have a chance.
Normally, there wouldn't be all this hoopla, even though the draft is always top heavy. It's just this kid is going to be something other than else.
now playing:
Belle and Sebastian Tigermilk
Thursday, July 14, 2005
in the midst of life we are in debt
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6 comments:
Too bad they do the lottery (to set the order of the picks) separately from the actual draft (where the players are actually chosen). I would love to see it happen all at once. Imagine, they pick a ball, call out "Capitals" or whoever, and that team has to choose their player then and there. None of the teams would know when their pick was coming up in the first round, so they'd have to think fast and be ready to pick at any spot.
When is the schedule done? You gotta plan your trip to see the canes vs. the preds. Ya know?!
hmmmm. don't know.
They're saying that the CBA will be ratified by July 21. The lottery will also be held on the 21st, and the turbo draft will be held on the 30th. The newly formed "competition committee" will announce changes to the game around that time. The NHL sceduling supercomputer will probably be hard at work as soon as the CBA is ratified. I would imagine that a schedule will be posted by August 1.
Here's the thing. The Preds are a Western Conference team, while the Canes are Eastern Conference. Forget about the geography of North America. In reference to the 30 NHL squads, Nashville is indeed on of the 15 westernmost cities. The scheduling computer makes it such that there's only one game each with the teams from the other conference, rotating home-and-home. So we'll play Nashville only once in the 2005-2006 season. We were scheduled to play them in Nashville during the 2004-2005 season, so I would assume that since that never happened, we'll still play in Nashville this coming season. I'll definitely want to come out there.
It'll probably be during the first half of the season. I'm guessing even more specifically that it'll be the middle of December.
I'll let you know as soon as I know.
I think the lottery is a bad plan, but so is everything else the NHL has announced this week.
And don't look for Sidney to be anyones savior. Lucerne, Switzerland has offered him about 4 times the money he can make in the NHL. If it were me, I'd have my passport in hand!
This whole collective barfgaining agreement is a horrible deal for both sides. The owners think they have won. What they have really done is insured the NHL will be on a par with arena football, indoor soccer, and major league lacrosse.
as you can tell, I'm a bit pissed off about it!
Yeah, Mark. I know you're pissed. I've read your comments here and the post on your own blog, and I still don't get how instilling a new CBA that features a salary cap is going to turn the NHL into a third-tier spectator sport. I don't think, as you do, that the product is going to suffer that much.
And, by the way, I think the League has done the right thing. There's no business in the world that can viably function when its labor cost is 75%.
Lugano, not Lucerne.
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