Draft Lotteries Suck for Die-Hard Fans

Plus: Yetis, The Seat, and a political letter that will make your eyes roll.

Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be sure to help somebody with their bag today, and you too might get drafted second overall.

But you wouldn't be drafted first overall by the Dallas Mavericks or the New York Islanders, the biggest winners of this season's losers. (I cannot believe the NBA includes the losers of the Play-In Tournament in the lottery). Today we'll talk about why fans should hate draft lotteries, an angry letter about the NHL All-Star Game, team names and trademarks, and a lackluster sports "documentary."

Locker Room Links

• Would you stay at a playoff hockey game that went into quadruple overtime? The Ottawa Charge and Montréal Victoire were more than 15 minutes through the fourth OT before Montréal's Catherine Dubois scored a winner, to the delight of a still-packed arena. That's 2 hours and 15 minutes of gametime, spread over 5.5 hours.
• "Nike is Still Ignoring Caitlin Clark and Destroying Shareholder Value"
• The feds take on sports: President Donald Trump is reportedly creating a commission that seems like it would suggest legislation or regulation on college sports. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, senators complained about sports streaming packages in what Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), called an "informational…fact-finding exercise."
• My friend Tim Carney wrote a great column on Ohio Republicans and their silly plan to subsidize a new stadium for the hapless Cleveland Browns.
• In case you missed it, the new pope is a huge sports fan, and was even briefly seen on the World Series broadcast in 2005. (The Athletic has more on the pope's sports fan bona fides.)
• Elsewhere in Reason: "Republicans Want To Redefine Obscenity"
• I'm reliably informed this person is not, in fact, my Reason colleague Fiona Harrigan despite all evidence to the contrary.
  

  Meet Anna, the fan who has been crocheting a sweater during all of Garrett Crochet's starts this season! #CrochetingWithCrochet ???? pic.twitter.com/g9DMnl67tl

  — MLB (@MLB) May 10, 2025

Tank This

It's draft season, which also means it's draft lottery season, where so much of your favorite team's history and success may rest in the hands of a pingpong ball—and I hate that. (Maybe I'm just grumpy because my Detroit Red Wings have never moved up under the NHL Draft Lottery and the Detroit Pistons got screwed out of drafting Victor Wembanyama.)

The point of the lotteries is to reduce tanking so that every team is trying hard to make the playoffs every year. But if the worst teams don't get a high draft pick, it just prolongs their suffering in the league basement. I'm not the only one noticing this tension:

3 straight years the team with the worst record in the NBA has slid to 5th in the draft. Just seems improperly weighted. Fans of those teams deserve better. The NFL draft is one of the biggest events in all of sports and they don't have a circus like this.

— Dan Miller (@DanMillerFox2) May 12, 2025

Fans obviously don't tank, even if some (not me!) are capable of rooting for it. If the die-hard fans who stick with their team through their worst times have to suffer through the team being worst in the league, they should at least get some optimism from a first overall pick. Players also don't tank, at least not for draft purposes: They have their next contract in mind, plus any performance bonuses in their current contracts, and can hold out hope a good team will want to pick them up in a trade—just look at all the examples of teams that won late in the NFL season and blew their chance at the No. 1 pick. Lastly, coaches don't tank: If they lose a lot, they get fired. Management doesn't praise a coach for leading the team to a high draft pick.

Management sometimes tanks, yes, by trading today's talent away for tomorrow's draft picks ("Trust the process!"). But basing a system on the "My team would never tank, but we need to stop rewarding their team for doing it!" belief is a bad idea.

The point isn't that tanking doesn't happen—it does, and there are tweaks leagues can make to discourage it. But from a fan perspective, if our team sucks in a given season, we want to believe something good can come of it, and that our team might be able to quickly bounce back. There's no draft lottery in the NFL, but a team can go from drafting in the first five to the Super Bowl within a couple of seasons. But in the NHL and NBA, people expect a rebuild to take five years. How's that going to keep a distraught fan engaged with their bad team? That's not solely because of the lottery system, but it's a factor to consider along with rookie contracts and minimum draft ages.

Sports are random enough on their own, and often the draft is enough of a lottery on its own, especially in the NHL and MLB where young draft picks are usually a few seasons away from the big leagues. Then there's the varying quality in draft classes: No.1 picks are not created equal. There are plenty of interesting alternatives to draft lotteries to consider—too many to go into detail in one newsletter.

I want to know what you think now: Click here for a quick and easy two-question survey on draft lotteries and alternatives, no fuss required. I'll share the results next week.

5 for Fighting

This may be the most upset anyone has ever been about the NHL All-Star Game, of all things.

Next season's NHL All-Star Game was supposed to be at UBS Arena on Long Island, home of the New York Islanders. The league canceled the event, though, and replaced it with a yet-to-be-determined international send-off event for the 2026 Winter Olympics (which will still take place at UBS Arena).

That did not sit well with Gov. Kathy Hochul (a Democrat). Hochul wrote to Commissioner Gary Bettman to express her "disappointment" over the decision, which she lamented was made "without consultation with the State of New York." (God forbid a business make a decision without asking for the government's permission.) Hochul's letter claimed the event was "expected to bring millions in economic activity to the region," which seems a bit rich for an event that yes, probably would have sold out, but likely with tickets sold almost entirely to the 20 million people living in the New York City metropolitan area.

The Hochul letter also tries to guilt the NHL by pointing out New York State spent $100 million on a new Long Island Rail Road station to serve the arena, "the first new LIRR station in nearly 50 years," which says a lot about New York's ability to build new things. Also, there was already a station half a mile away.

To close, Hochul points out what Bettman already knows: New York is home to "three NHL franchises and the league's headquarters." In a time when laws are so vast and complex that an institution like the NHL can be investigated, harassed, and punished by the state for almost anything, that feels a bit like a veiled threat.

It's a lot of political hullabaloo for an event that hardly anyone cares about.

Which Yeti Am I Writing About?

Utah Hockey Club is out, Utah Mammoth is in. The Salt Lake City–based NHL team announced its permanent name last week, one year after the franchise's move from Arizona. The name is a pretty good choice, especially considering some of the original options were Utah Caribou and Utah Powder.

But it wasn't the best choice, which would have been Utah Yeti. The audible alliteration would have been great, plus the mascot and the logo would probably have been really cool. The name was apparently a front-runner, too. But using the name would have been against the law, because the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected the idea: It would have supposedly caused a lot of confusion with other products using yeti in their branding—most notably, YETI, the cooler company.

How this would have caused enough confusion to warrant rejection is beyond me. YETI has a distinct logo using a distinct font. As long as the hockey team used a significantly different font, it would have been no problem.

Yes, the hockey team plays on ice, and yes, you put ice in YETI coolers, but that's about all they have in common. If America can figure out the difference between the Arizona Cardinals, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Louisville Cardinals, the Vatican's cardinals, and even the Stanford Cardinal, I think we can figure out the difference between a hockey team and a cooler company.

Take a Seat—or Don't

I usually recommend something to watch or do in this space, but this week I recommend something to skip: The Seat, a short documentary on Netflix about Formula 1 driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli taking over Lewis Hamilton's seat at Mercedes.

At 40 minutes, The Seat is basically a short episode of Drive to Survive—but we already had an episode of that focused on Antonelli (the same episode egregiously gave viewers the impression Mercedes driver George Russell won a race he was disqualified from). The Seat's marketing promised to take us inside Mercedes' decision making process, with access to previously unreleased WhatsApp messages. But the decision is made early in the documentary, and thanks to WhatsApp's sponsorship viewers get a subtle ad for using the messaging app for workplace purposes. (Did you know you can share lap times and files on WhatsApp? Your work messages can live right next to spam messages!)

The Seat is basically a 40-minute promo video for Mercedes and Antonelli—who I already thought of as young and likeable, and still do. It's flashy and the visuals are pretty, but it doesn't provide much of anything new. Unless you're a Mercedes superfan, go ahead and skip.

F1 drivers racing (and crashing) in life-sized LEGO cars, however, is obviously recommended.

Replay of the Week

We could all use a good dunk right now. Here's an insane one from Minnesota's Anthony Edwards, en route to a comeback victory against Golden State.

That's all for now. Enjoy watching the real game of the week, Michigan against UCF on Friday in the NCAA softball tournament.

Comments

[JFree]

The point of the lotteries is to reduce tanking so that every team is trying hard to make the playoffs every year.

It obviously doesn't work. The way to reduce tanking is promotion/relegation. You lose - you spend next season playing lower caliber teams with a MUCH crappier media contract. If that is likely to be a multi-year build before promotion - then the team sells some its player contracts both so that the star players aren't wasting their talent and, more seriously, so the team can lower its costs given the realities of the lower media contract.

Of course that requires that the sport has a governing body independent of team owners so that the league, munis, players, fans, stadiums, rules of the sport itself, etc aren't held hostage to team owners acting in collusion.

[JFree]

And speaking of tanking and crappy teams - how bout them Rockies. That really is a very good example of where collusion among team owners enables a truly incompetent owner to destroy a franchise. On the bright side, it won't be as bad as Jeffrey Loria (Expos/Marlins) - whose crappy venal ownership eliminated the future of Montreal as a host city, may well eliminate Miami re same, and enable DC to 'regain' its home town team so that the corrupt critters of congress can continue to screw the rest of the country and the sport by not eliminating the anti-trust exemption for baseball because they have their team so, to constituents, FYTW.

[Red Rocks White Privilege]

The Rockies can't even really be accused of tanking. They suck due to systemic institutional stupidity and sclerosis, rather than a deliberate strategy like what Mike Elias has done with the Astros and Orioles.

It doesn't help that baseball at altitude is a completely different animal than it is anywhere else. By the time pitchers go through the meat grinder of Lancaster and Albuquerque (and Colorado Springs before that), they're pretty much done before they even get to the circle of Hell that is Coors Field.

What makes it even worse is that they've been seduced for decades by the idea of having a bunch of bombers outslug the competition. What they should have been doing is taking advantage of Coors's absolutely massive outfield and cultivating a bunch of slap hitting mosquitos with high OBPs to spray hits all over the yard and extend innings. Instead, they get a bunch of feast-or-famine sluggers who can barely get a bat on the ball if their life depended on it. It's not an accident that their two Hall of Famers, Larry Walker and Todd Helton, weren't just bombers but had excellent batting averages and walk-to-strikeout ratios.

[tracerv]

Kind of what Whitey Herzog did with the Cardinals in the 80s. Speed up & down the lineup with Tommy Herr and Jack Clark to drive everyone in.

[JFree]

Ned Yost did the same thing with KC a few years ago - brought back small ball. Fun to watch

[JFree]

Baseball at altitude is certainly a near-unique challenge. But it is also a phenomenal way of attracting talent - and work with Mexican League (half their parks are altitude). The real problem isn't altitude. It's a sanctimonious and massively stupid owner who never hires outsiders. So there is zero drafting, zero development, zero injury/health stuff, zero coaching, zero player assessment - and zero chance of any of that improving.

I totally agree with your opinion re the hitting side. Anyone can thrive at Coors. Only the patient can keep games competitive on the road where the batters have to see real pitching again. That's mainly a drafting (for OF) and development issue.

As for the pitching side, they need two different staffs - one platoons mostly for home and one for road. The home starters don't need to have stuff. They need really strong mental fortitude to brush off the inevitable 3 run inning and keep going and who know they will never win a Cy Young. Multi-inning (once or twice through the order) relievers who can carry the innings needed over a season - not 20 pitch and gone. The only goal is - win the game. When they do find a Jorge de la Rosa type - give him a career long contract and make him a home stand favorite. Not waste his mediocre stuff on the road. For the road - young pitchers with good stuff, show me contracts - pitchers who won't have their stats destroyed by Coors - like every other team but with a bit more dumpster diving - so they can be traded. So that on the road - the Rockies have some great pitchers who can break losing streaks.

[Mickey Rat]

That would see to suggest a corporatist collectivist model of a ruling body for a sport, of which have,some of the most corrupt organizations, like FIFA.

[JFree]

More like the Football Association (England) and the German Football Association. The German one has 6.6 million owners - from teams to fans to munis to stadium owners to facilities. 25,000 clubs with 170,000 teams, 2 million active players (mostly adult), etc. A team sports version of the US Golf Association.

Here in the US - active playing stops at the Little League or American Legion/High school level. The role of adults is to pay MLB team owners and watch MLB players. To kill the sport - which is why MLB can no longer even recruit American athletes who gravitate to other sports now.

[Don't look at me! (This post comes with a 10% tariff)]

Professional sports are rigged. There is too much money involved to think otherwise.

[MyPublicName]

I get that, but are you saying pro sports are not worth watching? The players are still the best in the country, and I believe they still provide lots of entertainment value. But I would have to agree that there are a lot of shady areas in all pro leagues.

[Don't look at me! (This post comes with a 10% tariff)]

Didn’t say it wasn’t entertaining, but so was “The $64,000 question”.

[Dillinger]

>>entertaining

the pro sports leagues are entertainment ventures wrapped around attempted sport by the players

[mad.casual]

I don't know for sure, but I get the distinct impression the entertainment value of sports has gone down considerably since venationes went out of fashion.

[Trollificus]

That would require somebody involved with the business to let go of a $ bill...which never (ever) happens in the NBA

[damikesc]

The NBA is seldom worth watching. A chore on good days. And college football is far more enjoyable than the NFL.

[Mother's Lament - (Sarcasian Meanister of Foreign Affairs)]

I get that, but are you saying pro sports are not worth watching?

I never thought about it before, but probably. I haven't watched a professional sportsball game in what must be a decade. Lot of amateur and local games though.

[mad.casual]

The two (rigging and any given outcome) are not mutually exclusive. The house always wins at poker, blackjack, roulette, etc. without always knowing which hand will win, which card is being turned over next, or where the bouncing ball will stop.

[Dillinger]

did anyone ask Caitlin Clark whether she wants to sport shoes made by slaves?

[mad.casual]

But TMZ can’t sell Wilson, similar to how Nike, in all likelihood (even if you’re not supposed to say so) can’t sell Wilson.

I assume they're talking about Tom Hanks' volleyball.

[Dillinger]

maybe the phish tune?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YczrUml2-Sk

[Dillinger]

>>Then there's the varying quality in draft classes: No.1 picks are not created equal.

the true lesson in relying on #1 picks for anything is Len Bias.

[Sevo, 5-30-24, embarrassment]

"...President Donald Trump is reportedly creating a commission that seems like it would suggest legislation or regulation on college sports..."

Somebody in the elevator said he was going to regulate interstellar aliens, too.

[Don't get eliminated(How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer penguin meat)]

Draft lotteries suck for Detroit teams.

[But SkyNet is a Private Company]

The lottery is the tweak, you twink

[Marshal]

"Nike is Still Ignoring Caitlin Clark and Destroying Shareholder Value"

They're still being extorted by the ghost of Colin Kaepernick.

[Jefferson Paul]

As a fan of the NHL, I HATE the draft lottery. I get the desire to disincentivize teams from tanking to get the 1st overall draft pick, but the NHL went too far with it. There are 32 teams, and 16 make the playoffs. Every other team is entered into the draft lottery. This year the team finishing 11th worst won and got the 1st overall pick. The team that finished 14th worst won the second drawing, and got the 2nd overall pick. This is not the first time something like this has happened. The Rangers won the lottery about five years ago, and they'd finished around 11th-15th worst. The Devils have also won when they were something like 10th worst. The odds are better for the worst teams, but not good enough. The team that finished last in the standings has something like a 75% chance of NOT winning the draft lottery.

If the NHL insists on having a draft lottery to prevent teams from actively tanking, it should consist of just the 5 worst teams, and the other non-playoff teams should draft according to reverse standings. It would be better for league parity that way.