ABSTRACT

References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .339

Other than the season’s opening and final championship games, few events are as defining or as filled with hope and optimism as “the draft”—when teams choose prospects eligible to join the ranks of professional athletes. Practiced by all four of the major North American sports leagues, drafting is a highly regulated selection process developed to reduce the dynasty or hegemony of individual franchises and increase equality and competitiveness by establishing selection order as the inverse of performance. The draft is a rebalancing effort that grants a poorer performing team the first selection and the championship winning team the last choice. Teams that are able to identify and select exceptional talent can acquire athletes that will enrich their team’s potential and performance and delight their fans. In the National Hockey League (NHL), fortunate teams choosing very early can lock up generational players such as Lemieux (#1-1984), Lindros (#1-1991), and Crosby (#1-2005), or franchise players such as Ovechkin (#1-2004), Toews (#3-2006), Henrik and Daniel Sedin (#2 and #3-1999), and Stamkos (#1-2008). Conversely, teams that choose later or are not able to find “hidden gems” missed by teams choosing earlier, such as Datsyuk (#171-1998), Zetterberg (#210-1999), Robitaille (#171-1984), Benn (#129-2007), or Fleury (#166-1987), forgo opportunities to lock up entry-priced talent and tie their team’s performance to player development, trades, and free agency-paths exacerbated by salary caps and the uneven economics of small markets. Worse off still are the teams that are stuck in the middle, not quite good enough to challenge for the championship but neither losing badly enough that they win the right to choose early and reverse their fortunes. With such high stakes, it is little wonder that the draft is stressful for the athletes awaiting selection and general managers making their decisions. Drafts are a mix of luck, decision science, hope, optimism, and intuition and are often characterized by such uplifting but anodyne clichés as “we had himmuch earlier on our list,” “wewere surprised that he was still available when it was our turn to pick,” and “looking back, I think this will be viewed as one of the day’s great steals.”