Of course the NHL has a problem when it comes to teams losing in order to get a better draft pick, but make sure to place the blame where it deserves

It’s been an ongoing debate in the league for years, one that peaked last season and is resurfacing now as the regular season winds down. The logic is fairly simple: If a team has already been eliminated from playoff contention, then tanking – losing as many games as possible in hopes of landing a better draft pick – starts to look like an attractive strategy. And it’s one that several teams around the league sure seem to be embracing, often with the full support of their fans.



To be clear, players don’t tank. We’re not talking about teams shooting the puck into their own net, or otherwise intentionally making a mockery of things; hockey players are a proud bunch who don’t take being embarrassed kindly. And besides, no grizzled veteran is going to go out and lose on purpose just so some hotshot kid can come in next year and take his job. No, tanking comes from up above – from the front office that assembles the roster, and who have the ability to ensure that the players who do take the ice have as little chance as possible.

There are various ways that a GM could embrace the tank. They can keep top young talent stashed in the minors. They can shut down any productive player who suffers a minor injury. The most obvious step is to trade away as much veteran talent as possible, especially in the days leading up to the league’s trade deadline. That’s become an annual tradition, as the league’s worst teams open up the storefronts, offering reinforcements to the league’s better teams in exchange for draft picks or prospects. It’s a smart move, a struggling team’s best chance to stockpile assets for the future. But if done right it has the added benefit of weakening the current roster for the stretch run. And it can be taken to extremes – last year, the Sabres traded away both their goaltenders.

Ah yes, last year. The 2015 draft featured two of the best prospects to enter the league in years in Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel. The NHL uses a lottery to randomize draft order, but even that system ensured that whichever team finished dead last would be guaranteed to land one of McDavid or Eichel. And so the race to the bottom was on, with the Sabres seeming to give up on the season before it even began and several teams joining them as the year wore on.

By the end, the whole thing had descended into farce, with Sabres fans openly cheering on the opposition. Players were furious about that, as you’d probably expect, but it was hard to blame the fans for rooting for something that would benefit the team in the long term. (The Sabres ultimately finished last, lost the lottery and drafted Eichel, and he’s looked very good as a rookie.)

There’s a proud history here. It dates back to at least 1984, when the moribund Pittsburgh Penguins weren’t especially subtle about trying to finish last. They did, narrowly edging out the New Jersey Devils, and were rewarded with the first overall pick: Mario Lemieux, who went on to save (and eventually own) the franchise. Turn up your nose at the Penguin’s tactics all you want, but it’s hard to deny that they worked, and that you kind of wish your favorite team had finished last in their place.

In 1993, the Senators admitted (and later denied) tanking to get Alexandre Daigle, which led to the league implementing a lottery system. Last year, former Capitals coach Ron Wilson hinted that he had once been ordered to tank by management. Coyotes GM Don Maloney all but confessed to tanking down the stretch last season. And none of this is especially surprising, since the art of the tank has been an open secret in the NHL for years.

But the NHL and commissioner Gary Bettman have continually insisted that there’s nothing to see here. Last year, as teams around the league were desperately padding their loss column in hopes of landing McDavid or Eichel, he insisted that the media was simply making it all up.

Which is why it was interesting to see Bettman revisit the subject last week. This time, Bettman pulled out a semantics card that fans have been known to play: that “tanking” is just another term for rebuilding, and that finishing last is better than what he referred to as “the mediocre rebuild”, where teams stay stuck in the mushy middle without ever bottoming out.

It wasn’t quite an about-face, but it was a welcome bit of nuance from Bettman, one that at least tiptoed up to the line of acknowledging what we can all plainly see happening right in front of us.

So clearly, yes, there’s tanking in the NHL. But that’s not the question we started with. We didn’t ask whether the NHL had tanking; we asked whether it had a tanking problem. And that’s where things get a lot murkier.

On the surface, tanking seems like it should be a bad thing. It goes against the spirit of what pro sports is supposed to be all about: two teams competing as hard as they can to win. Imagine buying a ticket to watch a competition featuring a team whose management would prefer them to lose. The whole thing feels unseemly, like you’re watching the system being gamed.

But that system is the problem, because the NHL very clearly incentivizes teams to lose at this time of year. The league would no doubt point to its updated lottery system, one that now allows teams that finish dead last to fall as far as fourth in the draft order. “The beauty of a weighted lottery is there’s no incentive to doing anything other than win,” Bettman said last week.

But that’s clearly nonsense. A team like this year’s Maple Leafs or Oilers or Jets, with no hope of making the playoffs, has little incentive to win at all. Sure, we may only be talking about a few percentage points in a lottery system, but that’s still something. And if you’ve been burdened with the misfortune of being a fan of one of those teams, those lottery odds are about all you have to root for at this time of year. And if those Sabres fans who cheered against their team last year did anything wrong, it was being a little bit too honest about the whole thing.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are other ways of determining a draft order, including those that would actually incentivize winning over losing. There’s even an argument to be made for scrapping the draft altogether, and letting young hockey players entering the workforce choose their employers the same way everyone else does.

But the NHL has shown absolutely no desire to make those sorts of changes. So we’re left with the occasional minor tweak on the system we’ve had for decades – one that makes it in teams’ best interests to lose as much as possible.

Does the NHL have a tanking problem? Of course it does. But point the blame for that at the league itself, not the teams who are icing stripped down rosters or the fans who are rooting for the home team to lose. When even Bettman is willing to acknowledge that this is the best path towards contending for a Stanley Cup, it would be silly to expect teams to do anything else.