Grantland "How to fix the NHL"

[Locke]

Originally Posted by Tyler

The choose a legend to hand you the Cup is stupid.

"Hey Bobby Hull, fly to Boston tonight on the chance we might win the cup. Oh we lost tonight, sorry, are you busy in a couple days?"

He's the commissioner, he should award the Cup. It's been happening for 100 years. Don't change it. I don't care if you don't like the guy, you should at least respect the position.

Agreed. This will eventually degenerate into having local celebrities hand the cup out and we'll have Justin Bieber handing out the cup if LA win it again.

The Commissioner of the NHL, the League in charge of the Stanley Cup should award it to the winner. Its that simple.

[_Q_]

I think picks #1-14 should honestly go to teams ranked #16-30 in that order, ie. #1 should go to the 16th place team, #2 should go to 17th place and so on.

If your team sucks, they suck and should probably work their tail off to get into the playoffs by hiring a good scouting team that can find hidden gems in later rounds. If you're close to the playoffs, however, that #1 or 2 over-all could push you over the top the following year.

Also, trade deadline become much more interesting in this scenario. If you're one of the bottom 5 teams, ideally you want to trade away your few star players for picks to bubble teams that might not make the playoffs, but think they're one piece away from sneaking in.

[scotty2hotty]

Originally Posted by Wolven

No, he's right. The draft idea is ######ed and it has been discussed here before.

Hehehe, I was more referring to the use of '######ed'. I had had a few beers at that point and I was feeling uppity and overly PC.

More to the relevant topic though .... I am still intrigued by the idea and I'd love to see the powers that be explore the idea a bit further.

[moon]

Originally Posted by _Q_

I think picks #1-14 should honestly go to teams ranked #16-30 in that order, ie. #1 should go to the 16th place team, #2 should go to 17th place and so on.

If your team sucks, they suck and should probably work their tail off to get into the playoffs by hiring a good scouting team that can find hidden gems in later rounds. If you're close to the playoffs, however, that #1 or 2 over-all could push you over the top the following year.

Also, trade deadline become much more interesting in this scenario. If you're one of the bottom 5 teams, ideally you want to trade away your few star players for picks to bubble teams that might not make the playoffs, but think they're one piece away from sneaking in.

That is a good way to have teams suck for 10 year stretches and reward mediocrity. Would have been a great system for the Flames in the previous 5 years and a disaster for the Flames now.

[_Q_]

Originally Posted by moon

That is a good way to have teams suck for 10 year stretches and reward mediocrity. Would have been a great system for the Flames in the previous 5 years and a disaster for the Flames now.

I would argue that it doesn't actually.

Any idiot can draft the guy on the front page of The Hockey News on draft day. It's teams that can pick gems in later rounds and hire competent coaching while making shrewd trades that usually succeed.

Look at Florida for example. 13 of the last 15 seasons they have failed to qualify for the playoffs. 6 of those seasons, they have picked in the top 5 and most other seasons they have picked top 10, yet they're still a horrible team and will probably pick top 5 again next season. The Oilers are pretty similar as well although not Florida bad.

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by Ped

I would imagine, however, if the loser point is gone that teams would be eliminated sooner then they are now.

I doubt it. In 98-99 (the last year without OTLs) I believe only 2 teams (NYI and TBL) were eliminated prior to game 76 of the season. The reality is, even a small sample of 10 games left allows a team to be within 15-20 points of 8th place and still technically be able to make the playoffs.

I still can't see an argument that a 5-10 game sample should hold more weight than an 82 game one. Especially when the end of year sample could have drastically different schedules for each team. One team could have a tough road trip to end the year while another could have a homestand against powder puff teams.

[GirlySports]

Originally Posted by CMPunk

That would never work, games could go all night. And when you have airport deadlines to meet, you'd have teams not flying into town til the next day.

Even 4-on-4? I don't think many games would last past 20 minutes.

[Nuje]

Originally Posted by Locke

Agreed. This will eventually degenerate into having local celebrities hand the cup out and we'll have Justin Bieber handing out the cup if LA win it again.

The Commissioner of the NHL, the League in charge of the Stanley Cup should award it to the winner. Its that simple.

I don't mind him being part of the presentation, but I just don't think anyone in the arena should see anybody handling the cup until the captain picks it up. It should just be picked up by the captain.

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by _Q_

I would argue that it doesn't actually.

Any idiot can draft the guy on the front page of The Hockey News on draft day. It's teams that can pick gems in later rounds and hire competent coaching while making shrewd trades that usually succeed.

Look at Florida for example. 13 of the last 15 seasons they have failed to qualify for the playoffs. 6 of those seasons, they have picked in the top 5 and most other seasons they have picked top 10, yet they're still a horrible team and will probably pick top 5 again next season. The Oilers are pretty similar as well although not Florida bad.

Does that make the Panther's "the rule" or "the exception"? The Pens and Hawks were both terrible and then had amazing drafts for a few years and are now super powers in the league. They are examples of the system working as intended.

The Panthers and the Oilers seem to be showing the failure of the current draft system by repeatedly drafting well and not getting anywhere with all their young talent that they are stockpiling.

Personally, I wouldn't change the system to the one you proposed, ever. Rewarding a team for just missing the playoffs is a terrible idea. In no system should people be happier about having the 9th place team than the 8th place team and that is exactly what you are suggesting.

If anything, a minor tweak to the system would be in order. Some kind of diminishing returns effect to being "bad". Along the same lines as the Fighting Major suggestion where you start getting suspensions after 10 fighting majors.

It would need to be something like - if a team missing the playoffs 5 years in a row (or drafts in the top 5 for 5 years in a row) then their draft pick will be penalized by one spot for each additional year that they miss the playoffs. That way a team like the Panthers would be motivated to fix things so that they do not have a 6th year out of the playoffs as they would start to get penalized.

[Wolven]

Finally had the time to read the whole article instead of just sniping points. Organized my thoughts into Good, Bad, Meh.

===Good Ideas

Spoiler!

- Fix the standings and kill the loser point -
Agreed but instead make every game 3 points.

- Hybrid icing -
Agreed. Icing races are seldom interesting and have an unreasonable amount of risk in the play. I would much rather go to the no-touch icing with a fast faceoff and speed the game up even further.

- Fix the diving problem -
Do everything possible to fix diving.

- Redefine late hits -
- Keep the instigator rule, but tweak it -
- Keep fighting, but eliminate the enforcers -
All good ideas. It doesn't change very much but it does improve the rules.

- Crossover final -
I actually like the idea of re-seeding the playoffs once you get to the final 4. We often hear comments like "The Western Final is the real cup finals" because the two teams in one conference were both expected to beat whichever team made through from the other conference.

- More home-and-homes -
I like. Rivalries are always good in sports.

- Smaller goalie equipment -
Just approved by the NHL and NHLPA

- Close the salary floor loopholes -
I like this too. Its silly that the Islanders took on a contract just to make it to the floor. They should have filled that cap space with a productive player that could further improve their team.

===Bad Ideas

Spoiler!

- Longer overtime, fewer shootouts -
Disagreed. I love real sudden death overtime for playoff hockey but for regulation hockey in an 82 game season it simply doesn't matter. The idea of the 4v4 and 3v3 overtime periods is ######ed. I would rather go to a shootout immediately and make it 5 skaters instead of 3. Maybe force the shootout to be a team's starting lineup (3 forwards and 2 D).
People who say a shootout "isn't hockey" have apparently never seen a penalty shot.

Futhermore, what is the point of borrowing some random crackpot idea for a draft system and say it is a good idea and then take an idea used in one of the most popular sports in the world (soccer) and say it is a gimmick.

- Lose the puck-over-the-glass penalty -
Disagreed. The puck over the glass penalty looks bad now because players do everything they can to avoid it so it is usually an accident when it happens. However, before the penalty was in place players were willing to rifle the puck out of the rink whenever they were pinned in their own zone. Its easier to roof the puck out of the rink than it is to ice it. If the penalty is downgraded to an "icing call faceoff", I think we will see a lot more pucks being shot out of the rink.

- Make the nets bigger -
Disagreed. Making the pads smaller will do the same job and has just been done.

- Change the way we determine draft position -
All this idea does is change how teams tank but doesn't actually discourage tanking. Legitimate bad teams that need a #1 draft pick would be punished for not being able to win games.

- Go back to home whites -
Disagreed.

===Doesn't do anything

Spoiler!

- No more Bettman Cup presentations -
Doesn't improve the game and is really only a small part of the last game of the playoffs.

- Get rid of the referee microphones -
I would rather put better microphones on the refs

- Continue to enforce the rules against obstruction -
Its already in the rules. No biggie.

- Place a moratorium on redesigned logos/jerseys -
Cool idea, doesn't really change anything.

- You sign a contract, you disclose the terms -
The information seems to come out anyway.

- No more "upper/lower body" injuries -
I don't see this really changing anything.

- Fewer outdoor games -
Sure. 2 per year is good. Doesn't really matter.

[Julio]

As good a read...http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-tr...nge-in-the-nhl

[moon]

Originally Posted by _Q_

I would argue that it doesn't actually.

Any idiot can draft the guy on the front page of The Hockey News on draft day. It's teams that can pick gems in later rounds and hire competent coaching while making shrewd trades that usually succeed.

Look at Florida for example. 13 of the last 15 seasons they have failed to qualify for the playoffs. 6 of those seasons, they have picked in the top 5 and most other seasons they have picked top 10, yet they're still a horrible team and will probably pick top 5 again next season. The Oilers are pretty similar as well although not Florida bad.

The Panthers are also one of the worst run teams in the league with a low payroll that has helped keep them down and also one of the teams that seems to fall in the not last/top 5 that has a lot more failures than top picks.

Sure some teams still remain bad with high picks but the majority of elite players are coming out of the top 3 picks in the draft. Taking away the bad teams likelihood of getting those guys means they are at a huge disadvantage of improving over teams that already have them and now get higher draft choices .

It sounds great to tell teams to draft better but that is unlikely to happen, as Flames fans can attest to, just by saying it or even throwing money at the problem.

[scotty2hotty]

As for the draft position idea ... has anyone calculated how things would have differed in any other year? Obviously teams may have played out the string a little differently, so wins/losses may have been different. But has anyone done this yet as an example?

[Sgrath]

Goofy draft idea #3.1415

First four picks decided by best of 3 playoffs between 27 @ 30 and 28 @ 29
winners play of for 1st pick overall
rest of picks arranged as current

Hey 2 more BoA games can't be that bad

[GirlySports]

Originally Posted by Sgrath

Goofy draft idea #3.1415

First four picks decided by best of 3 playoffs between 27 @ 30 and 28 @ 29
winners play of for 1st pick overall
rest of picks arranged as current

Hey 2 more BoA games can't be that bad

KHL does this

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-pu...9610--nhl.html

NHLPA will never go for it.

[Fire]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

KHL does this

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-pu...9610--nhl.html

NHLPA will never go for it.

I hope the NHLPA doesn't go for it. Who wants to watch hockey where the players don't care and games are played in front of half empty buildings (unless they give tickets away).

[4oh3]

I like that whole top 4 thing imagine a flames and oilers Stanley cup final that would be insane

[19Yzerman19]

On the diving thing... You can't base calls on reputation, particularly not explicitly, because player reputations are usually only tenuously connected to reality. They're also media-driven. In reality, Dustin Brown is the absolute worst diver in the league and yet it took forever for that to be commonly accepted because the media didn't see fit to push that narrative. Not to mention, I do not want an NHL where players, coaches (coughClaudeJuliencough) and GM's attempt to win games by pursuing a marketing agenda in every post-game presser in the hopes that it will earn them an extra power play. There is a rule against embellishment on the books, if referees simply call it when they believe they've seen it, things will improve. Even the "no more offsetting penalties" thing is stupid - the vast majority of embellishment is in situations where there's actually been an infraction and the guy on the wrong end of it is exaggerating to make sure the referees actually notice.

As for people in here calling for 5 and a game, suspensions, etc for diving, imagine a game 7 of the conference finals, the Red Wings down 3-2 with 8 minutes left. Henrik Zetterberg gets his stick up and narrowly misses hitting Joe Thornton in the face by a few inches. Thornton, out of instinct, snaps his head back, and loses his footing. It looks exactly like a huge dive. Every replay makes it look terrible. The refs call him for a major and Detroit scores twice on the major and wins the series. But he WASN'T trying to embellish - he just reacted. He didn't think about it. That is the worst case scenario, but it's not hard to see that happening. The diving issue is complex and if there was an easy fix it would have been tried by now because no one likes it. But it's not a simple problem when you're trying to guess what players were thinking. A player who gets tripped, falls awkwardly and loses his stick might be playing it up for a call, or he might legitimately just have been off-balance. That's a pretty tough judgment call to make, and having the stakes be raised, you're going to get a lot of games decided by refs who got it wrong.

I do agree with the article that the way announcers look at the issue should change, shaming them rather than chuckling about it - "he, uh, went down a little easy there!" or whatever. Obviously they do this because unless you're JR or Milbury and don't care, you actually want to have a good relationship with the players you'll be getting on a plane with in 2 hours, and publicly lambasting them for being unsportsmanlike cheaters runs contrary to that. So I don't know how realistic it is.

The second thing is the late hits rule. I don't know how anyone who knows anything about playing hockey can suggest this. By getting rid of the puck over glass rule and replacing it with this you've effectively swapped one "worst hockey rule ever" for another. This isn't football, guys are on ice on skates. When you've committed to hitting a guy, it is basically impossible to avoid that collision for a period of time, depending on your speed. In many cases attempting to do so presents a serious risk of injury (half-avoiding a hit and winging a guy on the knee, for example). If you wanted to remove hitting altogether, this would be a good way to do it, because no one would ever be practically capable of going for a hit in a way that they could be sure wouldn't result in a penalty. Ever.

[powderjunkie]

Draft position lottery:

17th-24th = 5% (1 ball)
25th-30th = 10% (2 balls)

Order 1 through 14 should be determined by choosing the balls...I'd watch a 30 minute special on that.

[PlayfulGenius]

Anyone that thinks its ok to have some games worth 50% more than other games, under any context, needs to be slapped in the face...it's a total joke...shoot out or no, it's ridiculous.

Loser points are fine as long 3 points are awarded in total for every game.