I in the Eye
Drop a ball it falls
- Dec 14, 2002
- 6,371
- 2,327
Epsilon said:There we go! We can have a lottery for the draft picks and a lottery for playoff spots, maybe a 4 team mini-tournament for the Stanley Cup? Washington and Pittsburgh can have their precious draft weighting, while the spots in the Cup tourney are weighted in favour of Tampa Bay, Detroit, Philadelphia, Vancouver, and so on.
Excellent idea (it's as illogical as holding a draft this year, IMO - but at least the illogical reasoning is consistent)!
Bettman can come up with a weighted formula to determine the teams that are most deserving to be in the Stanley Cup tournament - based on past performance... Obviously though, to be fair, all teams deserve at least a little chance... After all, potentially, any one of them could have been Stanley Cup champions - if a season did exist...
If Bettman wants to be fair, what else can he do? If the bad teams deserve the rewards for being bad (high draft picks), the good teams deserve the rewards for being good (playoff revenue, Stanley Cup, Disney Land, etc.)... All teams are happy! - big and small! And that's what the NHL needs after an extended lockout that pissed off the fans - positive energy amongst the teams, everybody feel good about hockey - the silly, little fans can sense animosity and animosity goes against the new marketing promises - the hard cap fixes all! Of course, the 2004-05 season never happend, but who cares! Bettman is a hockey god, a Wizard of Oz... Armed with the magic of mathmatics, he can predict those teams that are more deserving than others... The 2004-05 season never existed in reality, but so what... In this same time period that the 2004-05 would have happened, the season standings still existed as things - in minds making CBA progress, in equations for Stanley Cup rings...
Of course these team standing equations aren't perfect (be it a weighted lottery or an equal chance lottery) - as nothing can be perfect where nothing exists... And it's, IMO, a waste of time to argue which system is better or more perfect - as to seek a nothing perfection, a perfect nothing is...
As good a way as any is for the owners to play strip poker... IMO, it's just as perfect, and it makes just as much sense...