Learning Day: The 2023 NHL Draft Lottery 🌭

The 2023 NHL Draft Lottery is an accursed video. You’d think it would be normal. Nope! It’s like if a boring regional business made a hostage video. It’s like if Dunder Mifflin kidnapped a hockey executive, and sent Scranton P.D. a threatening tape, but forgot to clear out the chintzy ball machine from Cringe Bingo Night. I can’t believe the NHL uploaded it at all. They uploaded it to their main YouTube channel. Me and more than 100,000 other sickos watched this.

What did we watch? A harried-yet-snorifying sports commissioner, describing ping pong pull logistics, whilst fidgeting between three ferns.

(Sean, please add the appropriate Gary Bettman showmanship to the attached screenshots.)

Okay maybe two ferns and a fig tree. I’m not a botanist. I am a person with a passing knowledge of sports. So I know the NHL is the world’s most prominent hockey league. A huge entertainment organization, with millions of fans…and apparently an allergy to entertaining. This huge NHL event is a snooze. A snooze! Even though hockey is – not to get too technical – a sport. Hockey is a sport. Sports are fun. You don’t have to agree with that claim, or feel that fun in your heart. I’m saying sports are by definition “fun.” They are a member of the “fun” category. Like circuses, and pony rides, and the Ginuwine song “Pony” inappropriately played to children at a circus. It’s like how an oil painting of a bowl of fruit is art. Whether you want that on your wall or not, you would define it as “art.” Hockey has that intrinsic “fun.” But somebody (everybody?) involved with the world’s top hockey league lost track of that here. For comparison, here’s the look and feel of the U.S.’s pro basketball league’s draft lottery:

That’s a show. With an audience. Because this is fun! Those teams are playing a lottery, i.e. gambling, i.e. fun. Then after the lottery, all the teams’ fans get an awesome new young guy to root for. It’s a joyous occasion. So the NBA’s draft lottery is a glitzy party. The sports drafts that follow are even bigger parties. The U.S.’s top football league held their draft in a giant public space this year, on a stage bigger than a football field, and more than 100,000 people tried to attend in person. They took over Kansas City to accommodate tens of thousands of draft goers, and they still had to turn people away at the gate. Because it’s fun! I don’t watch football anymore and this still looks fun to me:

That’s great. That’s like if the Bellagio was a city’s main square, in a good way. Meanwhile, in hockey land:

That experience is most of this video. For sixteen-plus minutes, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman gives a medium-effort explanation of arcane draft lottery rules. The camera framing gives equal emphasis to the National Hockey League’s next draft and the location of this conference room’s fire extinguisher. That’s the format for staring at Gary Bettman – a hockey commissioner so despised, he gets booed when he attends hockey games. The NHL serves up that guy, with no pizzazz or co-host, droning about policy changes from a recent NHL board of commissioners meeting. It reminded me of that time Jason Pargin revealed the low-key kink communities of YouTube. I wondered if this video’s other viewers have some kind of bureaucracy/minutiae hard-on. I turn my love of details and facts into something constructive, thank you very much. I don’t funnel it into a YouTube video of a hockey team called “The Anaheim Ducks” losing at Joyless Powerball.

A fun sports video should not make me wonder just how perverse the Internet can be. Especially not a hockey-related video. Hockey is more than classifiable as fun. Hockey is legit fun. Hockey is a series of supermen moving at terrifying speed, mounted on foot-swords, whilst always on the verge of (legally!) punching each other into unconsciousness. Hockey is so thrilling, they have to play most of the games in Canada, just to water down the excitement. Hockey is so cool, it made something interesting and organic happen in Ottawa. Yet when it comes time to see this video’s event, and discover the future of hockey, we get a video where almost all of the runtime could’ve been posted in a webpage’s fine print footer. An elderly man in an office building in Secaucus, New Jersey walks you through the potential results of drawing two sets of lottery balls. And he kicks it off with a bang:

Reminder: we are not watching this video live. It’s a recording they uploaded later. The NHL posted this with an untouched “uncle misunderstanding camcorder” at the beginning.

Imagine making this video. I can! I’ve filmed Internet videos in office spaces at a budget of zero dollars. In that circumstance, everything around you is a tool. I can relate to grabbing all the plants in the nearby conference rooms, and distributing them spread-out-ish-ly for decor. That’s free. That fits your budget. You know what else is free? A little verve. A bit of showmanship. A pre-taping rehearsal of the physical act of holding up today’s newspaper.

In this video, Gary Bettman holds up today’s newspaper to prove it is today. You know: like in a hostage video. That guy is essentially the CEO of hockey. That’s a cool job. Why are we watching him do proof-of-life drudgery? It feels like he got kidnapped by the league office’s nighttime janitor.

Good news: this guy (NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman) is not the only member of our cast of characters. Our ensémble includes such thrilling stars as Scott Clark Of Accounting Firm Ernst And Young. You know: Scott Clark! Of Accounting Firm Ernst And Young! And I’m sure you started a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ as soon as the camera panned to him, in the very first camera movement of the entire video, more than four minutes in.

The next reveal is even better. This draft lottery was attended by two representatives of NHL teams! Which is weird. Normally, in entertaining leagues, every team sends somebody to the lottery. Then those guys have some kind of active role: opening an envelope, reading their team’s name, wearing fashions the rest of us find humorous. That’s standard draft lottery entertainment stuff. It’s what these basketball guys are doing:

Does the NHL set up less than a hundred bucks worth of logo podiums for their teams? They do not. In the NHL, they only convince two teams, out of sixteen teams, to send a guy to this event. The two guys who turned up have nothing to do. And the staging of their reveal is “now please wave at the camera from a plastic folding table you did not think we’d film.”

The commissioner then gives that “[not actually your uncle but we call him that] bugging you” treatment to three reporters…

…before directing the camera back onto himself. Then, he asks if anyone has any questions. Seriously: he does a classroom teacher style “are there any questions?”, at the NHL Draft Lottery. He even asks for questions with that Inexperienced Teacher vibe, where he’s outwardly disappointed in the group when nobody pipes up.

“Are there any questions” is a bonkers agenda item here. Why bother? How would that impact anything? Also, all the people in this room are either league officials or reporters. If they ask a question, they are presenting themselves as incompetent at their job. All the less-than-a-dozen guys in this stale room are paid salaries and health insurance to know this event’s “inside puckball” details. Don’t bother stopping to ask for questions, Gary. That’s like if a Taylor Swift show ground to a halt to make sure everybody knows the name of the sparkly lady.

After that beat of “is the class even paying attention?”, we get a thrilling twist. We meet our story’s handsome young lothario. I say “lothario” because I assume that word is a contraction of “lottery technician.” Gary brings in lottery technician “Martin Gorba[muffled].” Martin enters the frame, to operate the ping pong ball device. This entrance is when the league’s flair for showmanship sparkles:

Oh heck yeah! Let’s let ‘er rip!!! I’m on the edge of my seat for the [reading that video screen as it is staged] 202023 DRDRRAFT LOTTETERY. I gotta say, bit of a wonky text alignment with the machine there. But hey, who could’ve predicted a glass cylinder would bend that image? No time to resolve that! The NHL’s burliest setup interns aren’t on hand. They’re several floors away, scavenging a fourth decor ficus.

I do want to celebrate Martin. He’s wearing black on black on black on black, in a way that visually highlights his industrial lotto machine speed-changer. Or maybe they asked him to dress like a hockey puck? Either way, he’s both manning the machine and navigating the erotic charge between himself and Gary. Sparks fly as Gary and Martin enjoy enough physical space for them to walk around each other, but only sort of enough physical space.

Martin is the third person in this video with a job to do. The second was Accountant Scott Clark Of Accounting Firm Ernst And Young. And after Gary and Martin select a few balls, we find out who gets the first pick in the draft…right? That would be what any viewer wants. But nope, not right, not yet. You see, the balls are not the teams. The balls are confusingly linked to a coded numbered system, in a way that ties the statistical odds of a lottery win to the inverse points standings of the previous hockey season’s [you skip ahead seventeen paragraphs in this article] and finally, read to Accountant Scott Clark. Scott Clark hears these numbers, then quietly looks at a stapled packet of paper. Then Scott whispers a city name to the commissioner. The commissioner then blurts that city, louder, to us, while mid-pivot. That is the dramatic reveal of which hockey team won the draft lottery. This lottery is legitimately a big deal! But it’s got all the thrill of your boss remembering to tell you there’s a package in the mailroom.

Bonus points to Martin for punching up this moment, by doing slick mob stuff with his jacket and hands. “Youse pickin’ foist Chick-agh-goh. Youse pickin’ foist.”

Let me pause the column for the non-sportsheads among you. The above screenshot is an earth-shaking moment in hockey history. It is the moment when Chicago’s hockey team got the first pick in the annual draft. That is a big deal. It’s an especially big deal this year. This year, scouts say the likely top pick is the best player of his generation. So everyone knew this draft lottery had Actual Lottery For Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars stakes. It’s major news which multi-million human fanbase gets to root for that super-talented guy, and which other multi-million humans will settle for a different consolation Canadian. Yet for some reason, the NHL chose to under-undersell this event. Again, I’ve made videos with zero dollar budgets in office buildings. I’m both upset and thrilled that I could’ve done this better. Heck, it’s even easier to shoot than the basketball version. It’s hard to keep a whole basketball player in the frame. Look at the most recent basketball draft. The spooky pallid “short” man in this photo stands six foot three.

Also, that is a nice photo. Basketball’s whole operation tends to be well-presented. They celebrate their new class of talent with a well-lit parade of beauteous slendermen. Hockey celebrates their version with a hostage video. The room is so beige, and the camera is so inert, it approaches the vibe of sad pornography. It also super, super doesn’t feel like pornography (Martin’s too angelic). But the action on camera feels obligatory for all involved. And at the end, it achieves full Hostage Mode:

That’s right: the NHL bothered to post and share this piece of mandatory legal evidence. The actual announcement happened on U.S. and Canadian sports channels. I’m guessing they let the sports show anchors make it funner. Maybe they light a fireworks array that spells “Chicago”, or pull the news out of a hot dog with too many vegetables on it. You know: showmanship! This entire video is not that. They taped this to prove their draft lottery happened in a not-rigged way. It is a grim exercise in airtight legal surety. And it does make sense that the National Hockey League taped that. There’s a history of other leagues, such as the Slenderman Association, allegedly rigging these lotteries. The theory is that they rig things so the cool and big teams get the cool and literally big players, because it’s more lucrative for New York and Chicago to beat Podunksville and East Podunksville. That suspicion clouds all sports draft lotteries. The NHL wanted to avoid that. So they posted this, and achieved that purpose. We’re all sure this NHL draft lottery was not rigged. Right? Right. Right! That must be the end of the column. I do see more words below this, but surely that’s the end of MY DEAR HOTDOGGER: I am thrilled to report the NHL’s video made me more suspicious of their draft lottery, not less. There is a yawning, gaping hole in their proof of above-board drafting. Because this video puts every element of the draft lottery process on screen…until the exact moment when they are pulling the balls.

Shocking twist: a fourth guy has a job here! A person we never see gets told to turn around and not look, and then call out the timing of lottery ball selections. We do not see him turn around. We just trust that he did that. Also the NHL wants us to believe my beautiful giant son Martin couldn’t get a ball machine with a gizmo that picks the balls for you. Those exist! But instead, they used a mysterious off-screen ball-caller. And then this draft lottery hands a generational hockey player to the huge-market hockey team in Chicago. Fun fact: Chicago won this lottery at an all-time low point in the team’s public image and reputation. Not to mention, a time of looming Chicago Hockey Team name change pressure. They haven’t even begun to address those problems. Chicago really, really needs a piece of good news to cushion the pain of all that. And oh, wow, they happened to leapfrog two worse teams to get that good news. It’s fishy. It’s fishier than the gross mollusk-based “hat trick” tradition in Detroit. And more than a hundred thousand of us saw the evidence. So there’s our accursed element, folks. This video isn’t just the dopiest anti-entertainment I’ve ever seen. It’s also the source of a grim, plausible NHL conspiracy theory. We thought we’d only consider this footage for a day. Instead, we’ll wonder if that guy turned around and looked away from the ball machine for a lifetime.

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