The season is approaching the three quarter mark, and two races are in full flight: the race to secure a playoff seed, and the race to secure a high draft pick. For fans of those teams clearly out of the former, losses are cheered perhaps more than wins as tanking is seen as the best route for the future.
Tanking, or intentionally trying to lose games, is something the league is naturally very concerned about. As such, the NHL followed the NBA’s lead and implemented a draft lottery starting in 1995. The idea behind a draft lottery is that teams will have less incentive to tank if they are not guaranteed the first overall pick by being the worst team in the league that year. The question is, has it worked?
Given that tanking entails trying to amass as few points as possible, there should be a relationship between the incentive to tank and how many points that last place team accumulates in a given season. Specifically, if the lottery has reduced the incentive to tank, last place teams should be accumulating more points, on average, since the introduction of the lottery.
Unfortunately, there are several other factors that also affect how many points the last team has. First, and perhaps most obvious, teams haven’t played the same number of games every season. This discrepancy is easily adjusted for by considering the number of points per game the last place team collects. So, for example, based on the current 82-game season, the Florida Panthers’ 36 points in 48 games during the 2012-13 season would be equivalent to 61.5 points.
Related, but not so easy to account for, is the fact that the average number of points handed out in a game is no longer constant thanks to the extra point handed out for overtime and shootout losses. In order to deal with this, we considered the last place team’s points per game divided by the average number of points awarded per game that season. Prior to the so-called “Bettman point”, this was one (2 points per game for 2 teams). Since the Bettman point was introduced in 1999-2000, this has bounced around a bit but after the introduction of the salary cap in 2005, it has generally been close to 1.1.
Finally, there are a couple of factors that can influence how good (or bad) the last place team is in a given season. As we discussed a couple of months ago, the salary cap (and accompanying salary floor) has promoted parity, which means that we should expect last place teams to be better (all else being equal) since the cap’s introduction. Moreover, during the league’s gradual expansion to 30 teams, franchises in the early years of their existence didn’t have much time to accumulate talent and so should naturally be expected to be worse.
The salary cap has existed only after the lottery was put in place, and most expansion took place before the lottery was implemented, so these are both factors that could make the lottery look like it’s having a bigger effect than it actually is.
So after taking all these factors into consideration, what effect has the lottery system had? What we found is that today’s teams are 5 to 6 points better over an 82 game season, on average, than they would have been without the lottery system in place. That is, if we were to consider a hypothetical world in which the NHL operated as it currently does with a salary cap, the Bettman point, no recent expansion teams, but without a lottery system for the draft, we would generally expect the team that came in last place to average 55 to 56 points instead of the 61 points that they currently get. Thus the lottery has increased the last place team’s points by about 10%.
As of writing, the Buffalo Sabres are on pace for just over 52 points. Whether the Sabres are intentionally tanking or just epically bad is anyone’s guess. But what can be said for sure is that even though much in the game of hockey is changing, tanking can still be done the old fashioned way.
Pre-Lottery Era | |||
Year | Last Place Team | Games Played | Points |
1979/80 | Winnipeg | 80 | 51 |
1980/81 | Winnipeg | 80 | 32 |
1981/82 | Colorado | 80 | 49 |
1982/83 | Pittsburgh | 80 | 45 |
1983/84 | Pittsburgh | 80 | 38 |
1984/85 | Toronto | 80 | 48 |
1985/86 | Detroit | 80 | 40 |
1986/87 | Buffalo | 80 | 64 |
1987/88 | Minnesota | 80 | 51 |
1988/89 | Quebec | 80 | 61 |
1989/90 | Quebec | 80 | 31 |
1990/91 | Quebec | 80 | 46 |
1991/92 | San Jose | 80 | 39 |
1992/93 | Ottawa | 84 | 24 |
1993/94 | Ottawa | 84 | 37 |
Pre-Salary Cap Lottery Era | |||
Year | Last Place Team | Games Played | Points |
1994/95 | Ottawa | 48 | 23 |
1995/96 | Ottawa | 82 | 41 |
1996/97 | Boston | 82 | 61 |
1997/98 | Tampa Bay | 82 | 44 |
1998/99 | Tampa Bay | 82 | 47 |
1999/00 | Atlanta | 82 | 39 |
2000/01 | NY Islanders | 82 | 52 |
2001/02 | Atlanta | 82 | 54 |
2002/03 | Carolina | 82 | 61 |
2003/04 | Pittsburgh | 82 | 58 |
Salary Cap and Lottery Era | |||
Year | Last Place Team | Games Played | Points |
2005/06 | St. Louis | 82 | 57 |
2006/07 | Philadelphia | 82 | 56 |
2007/08 | Tampa Bay | 82 | 71 |
2008/09 | NY Islanders | 82 | 61 |
2009/10 | Edmonton | 82 | 62 |
2010/11 | Edmonton | 82 | 62 |
2011/12 | Columbus | 82 | 65 |
2012/13 | Florida | 48 | 36 |
2013/14 | Buffalo | 82 | 52 |
get so disgusted with broadcasters labeling Sid as the best player on the planet (not content with saying "in the NHL") that I decided to come up with a new statistic called "Net Worth". This is the amount of Goals doubled (at least double the worth of an assist in my opinion), plus the number of Assists, plus a players Plus/Minus. Then I have a new ranking that I think is better than Points Leader. If I deducted Penalty Minutes, my LFP (Least Favorite Penguin) would be off the board since he pretty much doubles or triples every other good player. If you factored in turnovers, he would be in the AHL. Of course this is just for this season.
Rich Nash - 113
V Tarasenko - 110
A Ovechkin - 107
T Johnson - 106
M Pacioretty - 105
N Kucherov - 103
P Kane - 100
S Stamkos - 95
J Pavelski - 93
F Forsberg - 91 (rookie?)
J Tavares - 89
T Seguin - 88
SIDNEY CROSBY - 84 perhaps the 13th best player in the NHL?
10 more players
E Malkin - 74
*Phil Kessel, although 26th on the points leader chart has a Plus/Minus of -20, 17 points worse than any other top player, so Wayne you may be disillusioned with Toroto's star (and possibly why the Leafs struggle so much).
Just sayin'
Huh?
You should add a column to the table showing who drafted first (and maybe second) each year and who they got.
That's a good idea. I'll see about adding it soon. Thanks!
Thanks, really enjoyed the article!
I would love to understand better how you accounted for the salary cap's effect on parity.
I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on next year's revised draft format (lottery for the first 3 spots). I applaud the NHL for continuing to find new ways of producing parity. However, I have a theory that the more randomized the draft order will have an inverse effect on parity.
My theory is based on the notion that the salary cap (though creating a more equal playing field for small market teams) has also significantly reduced the effectiveness of free agency as a means for a bad team to get better. If we assume that free agency has little to offer bad teams, than the draft becomes the only means of improvement. If bad teams become less efficient at improving through the draft (because the most valuable picks are more difficult to intentionally acquire) than perhaps rebuilds take even longer?
Thanks, Neil for the kind words and your question.
Did you see the previous article specifically examining parity? I had a separate piece here on the blog that discussed the measure of parity that I used. There, I simply looked at a measure for parity for each season, and then divided the years into eras - pre-expansion, expansion, salary cap, etc. There was some arbitrariness, but the difference in the measures of parity was quite striking, I thought. At one point I did actually run a regression where the measure of parity was the dependent variable and I included dummies for the presence of the salary cap, expansion, etc. I didn't end up writing up those results (which had the salary cap having a statistically significant effect, although I forget the magnitude) because I didn't think it offered much that couldn't be seen looking at the numbers themselves.
As for your theory, I think you exactly right. The reason (or at least one of the reasons) we have a reverse order draft is to help bad teams get better. This is a different notion of parity. I previously looked at within-season parity, but the idea of bad teams improving from one year to the next is across-season parity. So while the new lottery will undoubtedly have some effect on tanking (and therefore within-season parity), it will also surely have some impact on across-season parity. It's hard to say exactly what that trade-off is, but it's certainly not negligible.
So, while I think that using the lottery for the first 3 spots might help (but maybe not - I guess we'll see), I would think that a lottery for all the spots would be a bad idea - for exactly the reasons you state.
Cheers,
Phil