Should the NHL decentralize the draft?
Frank Seravalli discussed the memo the NHL sent to all 32 teams with a single question about the future of the NHL draft on the latest episode of Daily Faceoff Live.
Frank Seravalli: There’s a lot of opinion out there about the NHL draft and the future of it moving forward. NHL teams were sent a memo on Wednesday morning and it was very simple. Check a box and respond, would you like to keep the draft status quo where everyone comes to the draft and is seated on the draft floor or would you like to decentralize it and have each team in their own war room in their own city with only the draft picks being celebrated on stage.
The NFL, MLB, the NBA, they all do this and for whatever reason hockey has kept it old school with landline telephones on the draft floor. It’s unbelievable when you see it, like is this really how things are going? That brings me back to the conversation I just had with recently parted Chicago Blackhawks assistant GM Jeff Greenberg who was hired in baseball as the new Detroit Tigers general manager. I was chatting with him last year and he was saying his first three weeks on the job, he goes, I was at the draft and I’m looking around and thinking how incredibly disadvantageous this setup is. Because you have everyone within feet of each other, when you pick up the phone and there’s only one other GM on the phone on the draft floor, you know exactly who that person is talking to and it’s not really hard for teams to piece together that they’re probably talking about this, because guess what, that’s exactly what I’m piecing together and then using that information as intel to talk to others.
It doesn’t really make a lot of sense that the NHL has continued this way and I’ll say from a selfish perspective, I enjoy it because it’s nice to have everyone in the same city for a stretch of time in the summer, especially in such a busy week with so many transactions. But moving forward this makes sense because every team has to fly all of their people in to the draft city then they all have development camp like three days later, fly them all back to their home base. To then start dev camp it makes no sense. Just decentralize it, it’s the way of the future. Have cameras in each war room if you want, find a cool place to celebrate the game and lets move into 2024 together.
You can watch the rest of the episode here: