Draft Lotteries Suck for Die-Hard Fans

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13-05-2025

Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be sure to help somebody with their bag today, and you too might get drafted second overall.
But you wouldn't be drafted first overall by the Dallas Mavericks or the New York Islanders, the biggest winners of this season's losers. (I cannot believe the NBA includes the losers of the Play-In Tournament in the lottery). Today we'll talk about why fans should hate draft lotteries, an angry letter about the NHL All-Star Game, team names and trademarks, and a lackluster sports "documentary."
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Tank This
It's draft season, which also means it's draft lottery season, where so much of your favorite team's history and success may rest in the hands of a pingpong ball—and I hate that. (Maybe I'm just grumpy because my Detroit Red Wings have never moved up under the NHL Draft Lottery and the Detroit Pistons got screwed out of drafting Victor Wembanyama.)
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The point of the lotteries is to reduce tanking so that every team is trying hard to make the playoffs every year. But if the worst teams don't get a high draft pick, it just prolongs their suffering in the league basement. I'm not the only one noticing this tension:
Fans obviously don't tank, even if some (not me!) are capable of rooting for it. If the die-hard fans who stick with their team through their worst times have to suffer through the team being worst in the league, they should at least get some optimism from a first overall pick. Players also don't tank, at least not for draft purposes: They have their next contract in mind, plus any performance bonuses in their current contracts, and can hold out hope a good team will want to pick them up in a trade—just look at all the examples of teams that won late in the NFL season and blew their chance at the No. 1 pick. Lastly, coaches don't tank: If they lose a lot, they get fired. Management doesn't praise a coach for leading the team to a high draft pick.
Management sometimes tanks, yes, by trading today's talent away for tomorrow's draft picks ("Trust the process!"). But basing a system on the "My team would never tank, but we need to stop rewarding their team for doing it!" belief is a bad idea.
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The point isn't that tanking doesn't happen—it does, and there are tweaks leagues can make to discourage it. But from a fan perspective, if our team sucks in a given season, we want to believe something good can come of it, and that our team might be able to quickly bounce back. There's no draft lottery in the NFL, but a team can go from drafting in the first five to the Super Bowl within a couple of seasons. But in the NHL and NBA, people expect a rebuild to take five years. How's that going to keep a distraught fan engaged with their bad team? That's not solely because of the lottery system, but it's a factor to consider along with rookie contracts and minimum draft ages.
Sports are random enough on their own, and often the draft is enough of a lottery on its own, especially in the NHL and MLB where young draft picks are usually a few seasons away from the big leagues. Then there's the varying quality in draft classes: No.1 picks are not created equal. There are plenty of interesting alternatives to draft lotteries to consider—too many to go into detail in one newsletter.
I want to know what you think now: Click here for a quick and easy two-question survey on draft lotteries and alternatives, no fuss required. I'll share the results next week.
5 for Fighting
This may be the most upset anyone has ever been about the NHL All-Star Game, of all things.
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Next season's NHL All-Star Game was supposed to be at UBS Arena on Long Island, home of the New York Islanders. The league canceled the event, though, and replaced it with a yet-to-be-determined international send-off event for the 2026 Winter Olympics (which will still take place at UBS Arena).
That did not sit well with Gov. Kathy Hochul (a Democrat). Hochul wrote to Commissioner Gary Bettman to express her "disappointment" over the decision, which she lamented was made "without consultation with the State of New York." (God forbid a business make a decision without asking for the government's permission.) Hochul's letter claimed the event was "expected to bring millions in economic activity to the region," which seems a bit rich for an event that yes, probably would have sold out, but likely with tickets sold almost entirely to the 20 million people living in the New York City metropolitan area.
The Hochul letter also tries to guilt the NHL by pointing out New York State spent $100 million on a new Long Island Rail Road station to serve the arena, "the first new LIRR station in nearly 50 years," which says a lot about New York's ability to build new things. Also, there was already a station half a mile away.
To close, Hochul points out what Bettman already knows: New York is home to "three NHL franchises and the league's headquarters." In a time when laws are so vast and complex that an institution like the NHL can be investigated, harassed, and punished by the state for almost anything, that feels a bit like a veiled threat.
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It's a lot of political hullabaloo for an event that hardly anyone cares about.
Which Yeti Am I Writing About?
Utah Hockey Club is out, Utah Mammoth is in. The Salt Lake City–based NHL team announced its permanent name last week, one year after the franchise's move from Arizona. The name is a pretty good choice, especially considering some of the original options were Utah Caribou and Utah Powder.
But it wasn't the best choice, which would have been Utah Yeti. The audible alliteration would have been great, plus the mascot and the logo would probably have been really cool. The name was apparently a front-runner, too. But using the name would have been against the law, because the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected the idea: It would have supposedly caused a lot of confusion with other products using yeti in their branding—most notably, YETI, the cooler company.
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How this would have caused enough confusion to warrant rejection is beyond me. YETI has a distinct logo using a distinct font. As long as the hockey team used a significantly different font, it would have been no problem.
Yes, the hockey team plays on ice, and yes, you put ice in YETI coolers, but that's about all they have in common. If America can figure out the difference between the Arizona Cardinals, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Louisville Cardinals, the Vatican's cardinals, and even the Stanford Cardinal, I think we can figure out the difference between a hockey team and a cooler company.
Take a Seat—or Don't
I usually recommend something to watch or do in this space, but this week I recommend something to skip: The Seat, a short documentary on Netflix about Formula 1 driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli taking over Lewis Hamilton's seat at Mercedes.
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At 40 minutes, The Seat is basically a short episode of Drive to Survive—but we already had an episode of that focused on Antonelli (the same episode egregiously gave viewers the impression Mercedes driver George Russell won a race he was disqualified from). The Seat's marketing promised to take us inside Mercedes' decision making process, with access to previously unreleased WhatsApp messages. But the decision is made early in the documentary, and thanks to WhatsApp's sponsorship viewers get a subtle ad for using the messaging app for workplace purposes. (Did you know you can share lap times and files on WhatsApp? Your work messages can live right next to spam messages!)
The Seat is basically a 40-minute promo video for Mercedes and Antonelli—who I already thought of as young and likeable, and still do. It's flashy and the visuals are pretty, but it doesn't provide much of anything new. Unless you're a Mercedes superfan, go ahead and skip.
F1 drivers racing (and crashing) in life-sized LEGO cars, however, is obviously recommended.
Replay of the Week
We could all use a good dunk right now. Here's an insane one from Minnesota's Anthony Edwards, en route to a comeback victory against Golden State.
That's all for now. Enjoy watching the real game of the week, Michigan against UCF on Friday in the NCAA softball tournament.
The post Draft Lotteries Suck for Die-Hard Fans appeared first on Reason.com.