Draft lottery isn't rigged, but the NHL happy to let people think it is

A gaffe that caused one of the draft slots to get prematurely announced had conspiracy theorists tying themselves in knots. The real problem is the NHL doesn't really care what people think about it

Connor Bedard will be going to the Chicago Blackhawks first overall. But should the Blackhawks even have had a first-round pick in 2023?

You’re free to go ahead and believe that the NHL draft lottery is rigged, not because it is because it most definitely is not. You’re free to go ahead and believe it’s rigged because the NHL, as usual, is closing ranks and refusing to explain an honest mistake, one that seems unique to this league and actually makes it look as though it has something to hide. Nothing unusual about that.

There is not a league in the history of the world that thumbs its nose at its constituents more than the NHL does. These guys wear their cowboy persona like a badge of honour. And there is also not a league that in the world has the undying and unconditional love of its fan base. Because sometimes you really, really have to work at hanging in with the NHL. It would rather look as though it has no integrity than admit there was a mistake made somewhere.

Rather than explain what was likely a production error when Kevin Weekes prematurely announced that the Columbus Blue Jackets would be dropping in the draft and picking third overall, the league and Weekes have not commented. That, of course, lends credence to those who believe that NHL is behind the scenes manipulating things to go in favour of a preferred team. But all of you who actually believe that know how ridiculous that sounds, right?

If the draft lottery were rigged, Connor McDavid would have never landed in Edmonton. He would be busy at the moment singlehandedly trying to save the Arizona Coyotes from extinction. And if it were rigged, there’s no way the NHL would have awarded the Chicago Blackhawks a generational talent in Connor Bedard as a reward for covering up a sexual abuse scandal for a decade.

Which brings us to whether or not the Blackhawks should have even been eligible to win the draft lottery in the first place. It’s beyond debate that the Blackhawks got off ridiculously easy by being assessed a $2 million fine for their handling of the Kyle Beach sexual assault, which occurred during its run to the Stanley Cup in 2010. That amount represents 0.9 percent of the $220 million the Blackhawks reported in revenues in the 2021-22 season.

The Arizona Coyotes lost a first- and second-round draft pick for violating the league’s policy concerning working out draft prospects. The New Jersey Devils were fined $3 million and lost a first-round pick – which was given back to them by the league when it allowed the Devils to pick 30^th overall in the 2014 (they would have chosen 11^th) – for signing Ilya Kovalchuk to a front-loaded, 17-year contract that the NHL ruled circumvented the salary cap.

The Blackhawks, meanwhile, get fined the equivalent of pocket change for an organizationally orchestrated cover-up of a sexual assault scandal that resulted in the biggest off-ice scandal in NHL history. Not only did the Blackhawks cover things up, they allowed the perpetrator’s name to be engraved on the Stanley Cup and gave him a championships ring. When they finally got around to firing him, not only did they give him a severance, they also provided him a job reference, which allowed him to go to another organization and sexually assault another young person.

There is a lot of credence to the notion that the Blackhawks should never have been picking in the first round of the 2023 draft. When the scandal broke in October of 2021, the Blackhawks had already dealt away their first-round pick in 2022 to acquire defenceman Seth Jones, so there would have been no first-round pick to take away from the Blackhawks in that draft. (Chicago, which would have been choosing sixth overall, recouped a first-rounder by dealing Alex DeBrincat to Ottawa for the seventh-overall pick, which they used to take defenceman Kevin Korchinski.)

So this would have been the year to penalize the Blackhawks. Perhaps next year and the year after that, too. But the NHL chose not to do that at the time, so here we are and the year after the Blackhawks lose two of the greatest players in franchise history, they get the pick that could replace them with another one. (And let’s not even get started on how hard the Blackhawks tanked the season to put themselves in this position. But at least that’s allowed, for now.)

The problem here, of course, lies with the NHL. This is a league that picks and chooses what to get indignant about and is wildly inconsistent in its penalties. You see it all the time with the Department of Player Safety and its director, George (The Violent Gentleman) Parros. What the NHL is basically saying is that if you try to screw with the salary cap or you try to gain an advantage over your competitors by making kids do fitness tests outside the prescribed times, that’s very, very bad. If you cover up a sex crime, then push the perpetrator onto someone else so he can offend again, not so bad. (It also doesn’t help that it requires a PhD in advanced mathematics to figure out the inner workings of the draft lottery. That makes it all the more mysterious.)

It's almost as though these guys make it up as they go along. It’s almost as though they look at every indiscretion through a lens so narrow that it doesn’t allow them to measure it against other penalties they’ve handed out. And most of all, it’s almost as though the NHL offices are full of people who don’t really give a flying fig what people think about them.

Carry on, then…