The Vancouver Canucks just put together their first three-game win streak of the season. They faced the top three teams in the Pacific Division, the California Triumvirate, and defeated each one.
And Canucks fans—or at least some Canucks fans—aren’t happy.
This is a problem. When Jared McCann picked off a pass from the hated Dustin Brown and savvily eluded a pokecheck from Jonathan Quick to score the gamewinning the goal, the appropriate response, you would think, would be cheers and happiness. Instead, the response to the 19-year-old rookie breaking his nine-game goal drought was one of sullenness and despair, if not outright anger.
This is what happens when a first-overall pick is on the line: it turns fans into anti-fans, cheering for every goal against, bemoaning every win.
It feels wrong.
It also leads to fans eating their own. The fans who want their team to tank mock and laugh at the naivete of the fans who just want to watch their team win a game, who simultaneously scoff at the cynicism of Team Tank.
For a moment, as they lost nine straight and plummeted down the standings, it looked like the Canucks had a chance at finishing last overall and Team Tank cheered every squandered lead and blowout loss.
It shouldn’t be this way. The current draft lottery, even with the reduced odds for the first overall pick, still incentivizes tanking, implicitly encouraging bad teams to get worse in hopes of landing the next NHL great, the franchise player who will turn their fortunes around. Fans, in turn, end up actively rooting for their team to fail.
There is, however, a solution. Adam Gold initially presented this idea at the 2012 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference and it’s been brought up fairly regularly ever since, most recently by Shane Doan.
It’s simple and elegant: The NHL draft order should be determined by the amount of points a team accumulates after it has been mathematically eliminated. Whoever has the most post-elimination points picks first overall, next highest points picks second, and so on.
The Canucks were mathematically eliminated from playoff contention when they lost 4-0 to the St. Louis Blues on March 25th. They lost two more games before embarking on their season-high three-game win streak. Imagine if those three wins propelled the Canucks up the draft board instead of taking them further from the first pick: all Canucks fans could be happy. And all Canucks fans would be rooting for the team to win.
It plays into the natural tendencies of hockey players as well, who never want to lose. Tanking teams are so often a house divided against itself, with management gutting the team and hoping for losses, while the players and coaches scratch and claw for every point, their competitive natures refusing to give up.
This system still helps bad teams get better, which is the whole point of giving the top picks to the NHL’s basement dwellers in the first place. The worst teams get mathematically eliminated earlier in the season, giving them more games to accumulate points.
The Toronto Maple Leafs were the first team mathematically eliminated this season, back on March 19th with a Detroit Red Wings win. They since have a 3-5-0 record, giving them the same number of points as the Canucks in this hypothetical draft situation.
In reality, the Canucks placement in the draft will depend partly on the whim of a ping-pong ball and partly on their final three games against their tank-worth opponents, the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers. But can you imagine the drama if the Canucks’ chances at the first overall pick depended on them winning those final three games, with the Flames and Oilers both desperate to win as well in hopes of landing a future franchise player?
I just want to cheer for a win and have my fellow fans cheer with me. Is that too much to ask?
