It was not. But I’ll be honest: I didn’t hate it as much as some of you seemed to. Of all the things they tried, only the virtual Draft House thing was a total disaster. The other 90 percent of the show was fine. Rarely great, and consistently cringey in that NHL way we’re used to by now, but rarely terrible.
But let’s cut right to the question that a lot of fans were wondering about heading into this thing: Would this be both the first and the last of the decentralized drafts, with the concept being a one-and-done?
Well… we don’t know. And that’s good news, in a sense, because the only way we would be able to answer that question with any degree of confidence was if the whole thing was an unmitigated disaster. Seeing it work well enough, if only barely, buys the league a chance to try again next year if they choose.
Will they? I kind of doubt it. That’s based less on what we saw on Friday and more on what we’ve heard from Bettman and others in recent weeks. The commissioner has made it clear that he’s not exactly a huge fan of the decentralized approach, consistently reminding us that it wasn’t his idea, and that he was open to going back to the old way.
That sounds noncommittal, and it is. But how many times have fans complained about something like the playoff format or replay review or shootouts or whatever else, only to have Bettman proactively shoot down any hope of anything ever changing? The fact that he’s leaving the door open tells me that the writing may already be on the wall here, much like it was back in 2015 when Bettman clearly hated the new compensation rule for coaches and GMs and it was gone within a year. The vibes here felt similar going into Friday. And while we may not have seen anything that would shame the league into immediately reverting to the old way, we certainly didn’t get the sort of home run presentation that would have everyone clamoring for one more year.
Save the Big Red Button, though. We can keep that.
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