Oilers win lottery for McDavid

Oilers win lottery for McDavid

The Oilers have defied the odds and landed the 1st round pick in the 2015 NHL draft after winning the lottery last night. The Oilers had just an 11.5% chance of winning it opposed to Buffalo, who were last, 20%. This means that the Oilers have had four first overall picks in six years which is unprecedented. The Oilers are one of, if not the worst development team in the NHL right now. It is all about offense and their team is horrendously imbalanced because of it. Drafting McDavid could be the thing that changes that but until they improve their defence and goaltending they will be finishing outside the playoffs.

Whilst the Sabres faithful will be naturally disappointed at missing out on a player touted as a generational player. The consolation prize though is Jack Eichel and that isn't a bad runners-up prize to receive. The Sabres are going about their rebuild fine and Eichel fits it. Naturally, McDavid was very receptive of the idea of being drafted by the Oilers, he is hardly going to say otherwise, but the awarding to Edmonton raised a few questions from fans. Why should a team get such an embarrassment of riches and if not, how can it be avoided in future?

The draft is there to serve teams the chance to draft their potential future franchise players. The lottery serves to try and prevent teams from deliberately tanking in certain years to draft incredibly gifted players. Right now the lottery is fairly straight forward with each team getting a certain % and the nearer to the playoffs you are, the lower your percentage. However, when you look at the fact that the Oilers have been rewarded three times before and haven't been able to drag themselves nearer the playoffs then you do question whether they deserve another top player like this.

Ideally the NHL would make a change to the draft and what I would like to see would be a similar drafting scenario to when the Crosby draft took place. That occurred just after the lockout and it was different to what we have now. Each team had three balls and lost one for each playoff performance or 1st overall pick in the previous three seasons. Something like that would work now as well I believe. It could do with some tweaks, perhaps give more balls to those who have missed the playoffs in those seasons to increase their chances but I think it would work better.

The idea of the above is to prevent the same team hoarding picks and to spread them out but to also ensure they go where they're deserved, so you would be very unlikely to see teams such as Los Angeles win after missing the playoffs like this year. I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on this potential method.