Nerding Day: The 2025 NHL Draft Lottery 🌭

The 2025 NHL Draft Lottery is two vibes battling to the death. It’s a mindset melee. The combatants: one professional-to-the-bone talking head, and the dullest gaggle of sportxecutives ever assembled.

I’m here to explore a cursed video. I’m also here to ask whether cursed artifacts can change, and grow, and heal. The 2025 NHL Draft Lottery caught my eye because it seems to acknowledge the grim failures of the 2023 NHL Draft Lottery. Surprise: that’s a link to 1900HOTDOG. I wrote a column two years ago about a previous NHL Draft Lottery. I fear I think harder about these events than the NHL does.

That’s the tableau you saw if you were enough of a Sicko to watch the 2024 NHL Draft Lottery. Last year, and the year before, and probably every previous year, the world’s biggest hockey league conducted its draft lottery like a white collar hostage video. They acted like hockey (a fun sport) is some sort of punishment inflicted on Ameri-Canada. That sucks! They are wrong! Hockey is not a rite we are damned to carry on for our sins. Hockey is not a burden assigned to us by a silent, looming Pain Deity. The friggin’ Shrike from Hyperion won’t slice us to ribbons if we stop putting Russian teenagers into big sweaters with “Tampa Bay” stitched too big. Hockey is fun. And draft lotteries are fun! Other sports leagues know this! They acknowledge and accentuate the fun event where a crowd of new super-athletes joins their rosters, and the teams jockey for good picks. It’s fun. And I despise every leader of the NHL who allowed hockey’s biggest draft lottery to be boring/cringey. Their negligence encompasses our entire lifetimes. I bring this up because for one brief moment, I thought that was all about to change.

It’s unclear how, or why, or the other journalism question words. But for some reason, in 2025, ESPN (U.S.) and SportsNet (Canada) teamed up with the NHL to make the Draft Lottery a live television event. They used ESPN’s studios and talent to do it. It looks as professional as any other ESPN thing. This news made me feel an emotion rare in HotDoggery. That emotion? Hope. I [checking spelling on this unfamiliar word] hoped something cursed enough to be a HotDog artifact might [gasping] improve. Could 2025 be better than 2023? The answer: no. The reason: Gary Bettman.

As you can see, that gleaming sportstastic studio contains Gary Bettman. Why would they ruin their studio with Gary Bettman? That’s like putting on a Las Vegas Sphere experience starring Gary Bettman, or a Carnegie Hall concert by Gary Bettman, or a Yanni: Live At The Acropolis where Yanni’s flesh falls away to reveal he is Gary Bettman Plus Wig. These are good metaphors I’m providing and you appreciate their quality. Gary Bettman is the despised frontman for a despised ownership class. Gary Bettman is the problem with every previous hockey draft lottery. To my horror, the eyes of ESPN’s viewers changed nothing about him. He acts like he doesn’t know there are cameras. He opposite-of-dances like no one is watching. I’ve never seen someone do less for an audience. Mid-2010s Dua Lipa walked so 2025 Gary Bettman could go Gary give us nothing.

If you don’t watch or follow hockey, I need you to know NHL owners seem uninterested in whether you’ll ever watch or follow hockey. That’s surprising, because they would make more money if you did watch. But they’re weird barons encrusted atop their property. Every good NHL thing happens in spite of them. Some teams can be fun. Most coaches try. Every player gives the real life equivalent of 110%. (100% sports effort + 10% extra quasi-legal fight effort = 110%.) Hockey is a good sport that’s fun on TV and even better live. However, the ossified and decrepit NHL ownership groups could take or leave the fundamental concept of joy. I grew up with an NHL team owned by a chintzy villain named Bill Wirtz. Bill’s nickname was “Dollar Bill”, in the cheap-ass sense. Bill refused to televise games if the community did not purchase every ticket to every seat in the stadium. Bill also refused to fund a hockey team worth watching. As a result, Chicago’s pro hockey team sort of did not exist, because Dollar Bill Wirtz did a stick-up to the entire Chicagoland region. I bring up that dead asshole (and his legacy of failson owners plus Sex Crime Denial) because that asshole mentality matched Gary Bettman. Bill and Gary probably saw eye to eye on everything. And Bill’s blue Star Wars Force Ghost smiled on as the NHL televised their draft lottery in a fashion repellent to humans.

I know this is dark. Yet take heart, my Dear Hotdogger. Hark! Look to the horizon! different part of the television screen! A hero rises to right the wrongs of hockey’s past and present and next couple years before Bettman retires maybe. That hero? John Buccigross.

John Buccigross might be the most normative man in America. I love that about him. His life is as tidy and typical as his bone structure. And John Buccigross is the exact midpoint between “white male celebrity” and “white male end of description”. He’s a longtime mid-tier SportsCenter anchor, with no bigger goals. So John Buccigross is famous yet anonymous. And John Buccigross walks that path each day. John Buccigross wakes up, goes to work at a sports channel, fulfills that job with an appropriate level of mirth, goes home, plays golf, eats the same Italian-American dish for as many of his meals as possible, screens an Adam Sandler movie for his baby grandson who he loves, goes to sleep, and does it all again the next day. The dessert flavor vanilla wishes it was as vanilla (in a good way) as John Buccigross. I’m lingering on this because John Buccigross hosts the 2025 NHL Draft Lottery. He hosts the lottery as if he is a party crasher. John Buccigross does his damn job, and presents Sports As Entertainment, while NHL higher-ups blanket the room in their eldritch nihilism.

We open on John Buccigross telling the TV audience what is happening. Wow: professionalism. Also: that is the exact same crappy ball machine from previous NHL Draft Lotteries. It looks out of its element in this room that’s been dusted. The machine is supervised by the exact same Ernst And Young accountant as last time. I know this because they bother to say the man’s entire name multiple times on the broadcast. This choice is yet another baffling vestige of The Secaucus Conference Room Age. The NHL’s guys drove from New Jersey to Connecticut without ever wondering if they should try a little. The only visible change in the NHL team is a young guy, who I assume is this summer’s League Office Intern. Each lottery features a different lad in different basic formal wear. The 2025 edition changes things up by dressing the guy in more than one garment color.

I watched all three recent draft lotteries to write this. The first two deflated me. Then I feel my spirit flutter back to life at the sound of John Buccigross’s voice. He speaks as if he cares whether the other person is paying attention. His rich Buccigrossian timbre lifts me from the depths of alienatioNHL. However, all of his words grapple with the deadening facts of NHL Draft Lottery rules.

Oh no. John Buccigross’s efficiency reveals this is an entertainment desert. Either nothing happens or almost nothing happens. It’s also a mental gauntlet. Instead of something fun, where they draw a ball and that ball is the winner, they’ve built a Rube Goldberg lottery. They’ll draw four balls, two times over. Each ball of these nested ball-fondles alters the odds of each team getting each specific pick in the draft. Buccigross gamely hypes this statistical flux-fest as something you can follow on the NHL’s website. After all: nothing makes a TV event more fun than needing a second screen to make it less confusing.

Somehow walking us through this hasn’t turned John Buccigross into a puddle. Also, nobody else on the screen behaves as if he is there. Why? Act like human beings! Is John Buccigross a ghost to them? Are we watching absurdist metatheater? I’ve seen characters show more warmth in the works of Harold Pinter.

All the while, Buccigross squeezes this anti-event for every drop of entertainment. Buccigross calls the first ball’s digit “lucky number seven”, because that is the most he can make out of a ball that means nothing until three more balls get drawn. Buccigross cradles that first ball for its only actual news. The news: one longshot top-pick candidate won’t get the top pick. That longshot team is the Calgary Flames. Devoted Hotdoggers will remember I established the Calgary Flames’ eternal doom in a recent column. Therefore, a bad draft pick for Calgary is not news. The Calgary Flames will experience bad things until the heat (lol) death of the universe. Does Buccigross realize this segment is a fool’s errand? Does he perceive the sheer mass of the boulder he’s pushing uphill? He might. Despite his professional caliber, Buccigross gives us one glimmer of flagging spirit:

A countdown ends. A second ball is drawn. ESPN hypes this with a big board of more teams losing the first pick. John Buccigross presents this as a light at the end of a tunnel. He promises that with two of the four balls drawn, we’ll soon be able to draw a third ball. After the third ball reveals its digit, we’ll be able to tell you which teams remain in the running for a top pick. We’ll also learn which specific fourth ball they need to win said top pick. So strap yourselves in, fans of the San Jose Sharks hockey team: we’re one step from another step that will indicate your future numerical odds of a good thing. And get hyped, because that good thing corresponds to a ping pong ball with “8” on it.

Even by the standards of offseason sports news, there’s nothing here. A rogue ESPN control room guy should’ve added bottom-of-frame text reading “this meeting could have been an e-mail.” I’ve had more bracing experiences on Microsoft Teams. Also the Draft Lottery turns into a Teams call at a few points. I had a banal jumpscare when they said eleven teams could still win the Draft Lottery, then showed their eleven general managers in eleven Zoom windows in a big grid. They’d been here this whole time, in a distracted way.

Tag yourself! I’m Stanley Cup winner Barry Trotz trying to descend his head into his torso like a cartoon turtle.

Does the ESPNHL broadcast continue this weird conference call format? Answer: they do it one more time. The second time features the most anarchic possible layout for seven faces.

Tag yourself! I’m the guy looking at his phone or napping, even though he might get the top draft pick in a few seconds.

As this all escalates, John Buccigross suffers for the NHL’s sins. When the hockey intern selects a third ball, Buccigross works so hard to make that a moment, he accidentally reads out the numbers of balls three, one, two, and then three again. I half thought he hijacked the lottery and made ball three also balls four and one yet no longer ball three, to end this torment sooner and also make everyone as insane as they’d made him.

It’s not all the NHL’s fault. Part of the tedium is compliance stuff. They have to show every ball being drawn. That way everyone can be confident this was all above board. Oh, by the way, just before the five minute mark of this broadcast, the entire video feed cuts out for a long time. I guess that’s unfixable? They uploaded the recording to YouTube with the key bit still missing.

Whoops. Oopsies! Also, potential fraud? American sports draft lotteries get inspected like the Zapruder film. Every fanbase’s worst troglodytes think the league is out to get them. Also they might’ve been right in 1985, when the NBA’s draft lottery gave the New York team the top pick. Conspiracists think this happened because New York earns the league more money than [fill in your least favorite city. I promise I won’t tell them you said that. I promise! It’s between you and me]. That 1985 NBA Draft Lottery is something you can watch, because the basketball league televised the lottery, because they are forty years ahead of the NHL when it comes to new ideas in entertaining people. And this is the context in which the NHL draft lottery video glitches. It goes dark in the most important situation for it not to go dark, fairness-wise. Sorry, hockey fans! Great news, conspiracists! Mixed result, if you’re both! Never easy rooting for both the Ottawa Senators and “the ‘senators’ in Ottawa are lizard people.”

When the video returns, John Buccigross lists the names of hockey team mascots with as much excitement as possible. It feels like a better version of a child padding a homework essay to hit the word count minimum. Then Buccigross bursts into a “WOW” followed by a pause followed by a “HOLY SCHNIKES”, because Gary Bettman lost his train of thought in the biggest moment of this lottery, and somebody’s gotta fill that gap with stray dialogue from Will Ferrell movies.

Buccigross makes me wish I worked harder. As this funereal march straggles on, he mines it for every hypeable nugget of information. Then, someone selects the final ball. We should instantly get told what that means. The lottery is over. They already showed us what that last ball means, in a big graphic we didn’t take notes on. Tell us which hockey team gets the first pick.

An eon passes. The NHL’s commissioner, assistant commissioner, intern, and accountant pass around the ball and also handwrite notes to each other. ESPN’s crew tries to make something out of this with a swooping Michael Bay-style swingaround shot of the entire room. They reach the end of their swing long before this admin nonsense ends, and the camera has to just sit there until they finish.

Tag yourself! I’m every man who didn’t know what to do with his hands or face. Therefore: 🎶Iiiiiiiiii’m every ma-an.🎶

Albert Camus said one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Alex Schmidt says we must imagine John Buccigross’s face as the climax of this draft lottery crashes and burns. John Buccigross is offscreen. This means the lottery’s end is a Choose Your Own Buccigross. Is he looking at his wristwatch? Is he unable to look at his wristwatch because his head and neck are gnarled in a stiff, agonized rictus? Or is John Buccigross chomping onto a chicken parm, for relief, like it’s that piece of wood Civil War surgeons stuff into a pre-amputee’s mouth? We’ll never know. I just know John’s counting the milliseconds till this is over. John Buccigross is a pure being of Light Entertainment. He exists to fill dead air. He just wants his show to be A Show. Instead, his show cuts to the laptop camera feed of the skele-face of the New York Islanders’ director of pro scouting.

John Buccigross raves about this thrilling conclusion to the NHL Draft Lottery, while a C-Suite Crypt Keeper shakes his head in muted surprise on Long Island. There are also two hockey sweaters in his background, draped over what are clearly relocated dining room chairs.

What was all this for? What did it mean? According to the YouTube video’s viewcount, it meant nothing. The pizzazz did not do numbers. 110,000 weirdos watched this video. A stunningly similar audience watched the dingy 2023 edition.

After this lottery, the NHL held its draft without encouraging anybody to show up in person. Huh? Then that draft’s brief set of draft picks took longer than a movie with an intermission. Also those picks are considered a “weak draft class” in terms of talent. Drafting number one was…fine. One of the other high picks went to a team who spent last season wearing uniforms that look like video game “create a team” crap. Anyway, I’m rambling. I’m exhausted. Hockey’s executive dullards drained me of my will to continue this day. Time to take John Buccigross’s religion-inflected advice and eat mashed potatoes until I fall into a starchy torpor-sleep. Goodbye, cruel draft lottery day. See you on the other side of sunrise.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mercenary Sysadmin, a subspecies of Mothman that inhabits NHL draft streams to sow chaos and discord with unfixable outages.