Do I Feel Bad?

We won and they whined. We actually didn’t win, but still benefitted, and they whined. We won a 2nd time and the whining reached peak level. The Oilers picked 1^st in the draft for three years in a row against all odds and the other teams cried foul. Rules were changed. We told them it was stupid. Now look at those idiots. And do I feel bad? Nope.

It is absolutely true that the reason the Avalanche and the Canucks are washing their tear-stained pillow casings today are because the Oilers were hella awful for way too long. They sucked. They even sucked on purpose for a while until they tried to stop sucking and found out that they were sucking because they just didn’t know how to do anything else. The end result was a team that scrapped the bottom of the NHL and in turn picked up the best odds to win the lottery.

But all they had were odds. It was a 25% chance for the Oilers to win Hall. They lost the lottery in the RNH draft but rules prevented the Devils from moving up any higher than 4^th overall with their win. The Devils only had a 3.6% chance of winning. Edmonton only had an 18.8% chance to win in 2012 to take Nail Yakupov, but luck was on their side (debatable depending on who you ask).

Based on my advanced calculations (I’m not even sure I’m mathing correctly. I have Arts Degrees, people), the odds of those things happening the way they did were about 0.17% (25% x 18.8% x 3.6%). This is BEFORE the Oilers win the McDavid lottery on 11.5% odds. So this thing plays out on the slimmest of odds but instead of recognizing this, the fans, the broadcasters, and to a large extent the NHL itself freaks out and starts proposing changes to the NHL Lottery process.

Fine. No problem. And in their zeal to retroactively punish the Oilers for winning on a longshot they decide to remove protections to keep the worst teams in the NHL from drafting impact players.

Wait. What?

Odds are lowered even further at the top of the lottery eligible teams and expanded to teams who are significantly better. Um…OK. And the league baby steps towards a process that can see the absolute worst team in the league pick fourth. All because the Oilers hit on a 0.17% chance to do something crazy?! In a rational world there’s no way that happens because someone sits down the hysterical GMs and other club representatives to explain that the Drafts is *supposed* to help bad teams get better and sometimes weird things happen with luck but overall the process works. Maybe the NHL even had that guy in the corner trying to explain how these things work but he certainly wasn’t heard over the cries of the babies in suits wailing about how unfair life is.

“Waaaahhhhhhh. The Oilers keep winning. Wahhhhhhhhhhhh. NOT FAIR!!!” – 200 Hockey Men.

Well let’s fast forward now to the 2017 NHL Draft lottery and the Avalanche are a blight on the league that is an embarrassment to professional sport. They were worse than any team the Oilers ever iced and that’s probably the worst thing you can say about a team in the NHL. The team is being run by a man who once willingly shoved his hand in a snow blower and the results are as expected. Even their head coach bailed just weeks before the season after he looked at the final roster.

And the Canucks? The Godless Canucks? Ha! You might think it’s impossible for me to hate the Canucks since they don’t matter and probably won’t ever again, but you’d be wrong. The Canucks are still in my top three most hated organizations ever behind only the Flames and Moose Toys, the monsters behind the Shopkins craze. Their best players are old and their best prospects would rather play in Siberia than stay in Vancouver. Well done.

These teams ought to be drafting in prime positions and they probably NEED to do it if they ever want to break the cycle of failure and rise again in the NHL. But they won’t. They’ll draft 4^th and 5^th, which sounds like it’s still pretty good but everyone tracking the Draft knows there is always a massive drop outside of the top 3. And this is a draft that wasn’t exciting at the top to begin with.

But do I feel bad for these whiners who cried foul now that they’re getting exactly what they wanted?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No. I do not.

Tough luck, Avalanche. Too bad, Canucks. It took three random events with an infinitesimally small chance of happening to change the rules and screw over the worst teams in the league and the other fans in the NHL can blame nobody but themselves for it. And the best part? It will probably take a decade or more for the implications these changes have on bad teams to become evident and recognized before we change back to a system that helps poor teams get better.

Good news though, you Canuck and Avalanche fans can watch Connor McDavid rip through your garbage teams for the next decade while you wait. And I’ll remind you that this is exactly what you deserve.

Idiots.