NHL got idea of draft lottery from NBA

For hockey fans in 15 cities, it’s time to break out the good luck charms, time to get superstitious and perhaps get lucky.

The NHL Draft Lottery will be Saturday in Toronto, and millions will be watching to see who gets the No. 1 pick in the NHL Entry Draft on June 23 and 24 in Chicago. The lottery will be televised at 5 p.m. on NBC.

The expansion Golden Knights are one of the 15 participating teams, and general manager George McPhee is familiar with the process.

In 2004, McPhee was general manager of the Washington Capitals, who won the lottery and took Russian forward Alexander Ovechkin. Now 31, Ovechkin is the team’s captain and Washington’s career leader in goals (558) and points (1,035).

“What I remember about that year was it wasn’t televised, and they did it at the league office and told us we won,” McPhee said. “It wasn’t the big event that you see now.”

Early lottery history

The NBA instituted a draft lottery in 1985 with the idea of preventing teams from tanking to lock up the No. 1 pick. Of course, it didn’t stop teams from trying to lose to enhance their chances in the lottery, and in 1990, the league instituted a weighted lottery to determine the top three picks.

Gary Bettman worked for the NBA then. He liked the idea of a lottery for hockey, and when he became NHL commissioner in 1993, one of his first moves was to implement one.

“The system was put into place to ensure the integrity of our regular season and the competition in our regular season,” said NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly, who joined the NHL in 1997 and became deputy commissioner in 2005. “In my mind, it’s all about perception, and as long as a team can’t lose its way into a guaranteed first overall pick, you are protecting against that perception.”

The first NHL lottery was in 1995. Like the NBA, the NHL’s lottery was to determine who would pick first, second and third. The Los Angeles Kings won the first lottery, moving from seventh to third. The Ottawa Senators got the No. 1 pick and took defenseman Bryan Berard.

Daly remembers 2005 as a key year for the league and the lottery. That was the year Sidney Crosby was the No. 1 pick and the lottery was televised for the first time.

“Crosby’s was our first televised draft lottery and certainly garnered a lot of attention — for multiple reasons, including its unique format (all teams were eligible to win),” Daly said. “The fact that we had been away for a full year and now we were back, and because of the incredible talent (Crosby) that was available for the lottery winner made it memorable for the league.”

For 2015, the odds were more evenly distributed, and the team with the worst record had less weight. It also abandoned the maximum four-slot move up.

Fast forward to last year when the league changed the lottery rules to what are essentially three lotteries, one for each of the top three spots. If a team finished last, it was guaranteed a top-four selection. If a team didn’t win the top pick, its chances of finishing second or third increased with the weighted odds.

“The feeling was that some minor modifications made sense because there generally is so little difference competitively between and among all our clubs, and more particularly, between and among our nonplayoff qualifiers,” Daly said in explaining the tweaks to the system. “So we did two new things: One, we smoothed the odds as between the teams competing in the lottery, and two, we decided to draw for the top three spots instead of only the top spot.

“Changes were consistent with our feelings that the ‘worst team’ statistically isn’t usually all that different than all the other teams that miss the playoffs in an isolated season.”

Las Vegas formula

When the NHL admitted Las Vegas into the league on June 22, it already had given thought to how the team would participate in the entry draft and the lottery.

It was determined that Las Vegas would have the same chance as the team with the third-worst record. As it turned out, the Golden Knights are on equal footing with the Arizona Coyotes. Both teams have a 10.3 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick. Colorado has the best chance at 18 percent, followed by Vancouver at 12.1 percent.

“The slotting of Las Vegas reflects the fact that while we wanted to give Vegas heightened odds to win the first overall pick, the necessity of guaranteeing them that pick is far less significant today than it might have been 20 years ago,” Daly said of the decision to include the Golden Knights in the process rather than simply award them a slot. “The team will have the benefit of a strong and deep expansion draft, and with our current economic system, and with the good management that the Golden Knights have, all of our clubs have a chance to compete for championships on a regular basis.”

Contact Steve Carp at scarp@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2913. Follow @stevecarprj on Twitter.