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Bruce Dowbiggin

No Tanks: The Draft Lottery Is A Losing Proposition

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The race for the NFL’s biggest prize is almost half over. In the NHL and NBA the hunt is just starting. The race to the top?

Uh, no. We’re talking about the NFL race to the toilet for Alabama QB Bryce Young. In the NHL it’s tanking for phenom Connor Bedard. Over at the NBA it’s chasing 7-foot-4 Frenchman Victor Wembanyama. The chance to change your franchise’s fortunes in a single pick has produced a vintage season for tanking. And a shocking number of teams are preparing to go that route.

And it’s making the people who run sports leagues talking draft reforms and— gasp— relegation. Put simply, the salary cap/ draft system implemented for half a century at great labour strife in the major sports leagues has incentivized two things. Winning it all. And losing a lot— to recruit the talent you need to win it all. It’s a case of be careful what you wish for if you own a pro sports team.

Tanking can be defined as losing without blatantly appearing to lose. So Carolina Panthers have started a fire sale, sending star RB Christian McCaffrey to San Francisco 49ers and receiver Robbie Anderson to Arizona. (Then winning this weekend.) In the NHL Montreal Canadiens fans are cursing every win that lessens their chance for Bedard, who despite a French name is from Western Canada. In the NBA a handful of clubs are already starting terrible lineups in hopes of landing Wembanyama.

We did an exhaustive history of tanking in our 2019 book Cap In Hand. For the sake of simplicity just study our chapter on the 1993 Ottawa Senators tanking to get Alexandre Daigle, who turned out to be a dud. Or check out how the GM of the 2010-2015 Philadelphia 76ers launched a multi-year tanking campaign that brought them franchise stars Joel Embid and Ben Simmons.

Alarmed, leagues have tried reducing the odds of tankers from getting top picks in the draft. Which only convinced more underachievers to pound sand. Teams can now jump up three, four or five picks to leap-frog the worst tankers. Making the end of the regular season into loser-palooza, (in the words of VSIN host Gill Alexander). Great for bettors and teams courting a superstar.

But lousy for fans. Which makes the suits nervous. NBA commissioner Adam Silver has told employees of the Phoenix Suns that his league has “put teams on notice” and will pay “particular attention” to tanking this season. “It’s something we have to watch for,” Silver said. “A draft is, in principle, a good system. But I get [tanking], especially when there is a sense that a once-in-a-generation player is coming along, like we have this year…

“Teams are smarter, they are creative, and they respond — we move, they move — so we’re always looking to see whether there’s yet a better system.” One of the ideas considered is the possibility of implementing a promotion/relegation system like the one in European soccer. The three worst teams each year are dropped to a lower league while three are promoted. Games— and big money— ride on finishing the season strong.

Silver says that relegation and dramatic changes to the draft are a bridge too far for his league. For now. But as we write in Cap In Hand, with expansion and the changing economics of pro team sports, leagues are faced with a very different economic model than they faced in the 1970-2000 period. In those days franchising was the byword. Get a team— and a broadcast network— in every large market.

That model is shot. Fans of global sports like the NBA want to see best-on-best, not Sacramento/ Oklahoma City or Winnipeg/ Columbus in the NHL. And they’re willing to bet on it. Commissioners and owners now understand that if they lost or relegated their six smallest markets they’d get the same money for their broadcast/ digital/ logo rights. Betting companies would still flock to them.

A perfect example of this sea change is the fracturing of NCAA college football. Long the purview of about 20 rich, elite schools who carried their conference partners, it’s now seeing a dramatic re-ordering with all the big dogs concentrating in the SEC and the BIG10. Old partners and bowl games are being cast aside. Networks are honing in on the brands they can sell.

Importantly the top NFL (and NBA) prospects are using the new transfer portal to get to teams that have a higher profile. It’s The Ohio State University, not North Texas or Vanderbilt for young athletes looking for to cash in on their name, image and likeness (NIL) cash.

The same demand to see the best is what led to the messy PGA Tour / LIV Golf schism. After decades of ignoring the demands from stars such as Greg Norman and Phil Mickelson to promote and pamper the top tier of the Tour, those stars decamped to a rogue league funded by the Saudis. Tellingly, the PGA Tour— afraid of losing more of the elite— has now scrambled to deliver on Greg Norman’s wish list that caused the split. Too late.

In our book we foresee an industry based on the European soccer model of “let the big dogs eat”. No salary caps. No tanking. No driving up the price of talent with 7-round drafts. Keeping all the present teams and adding more— but dividing leagues into divisions based on market factors.

Traditionalists won’t like seeing their team relegated to a second division. Like the soccer or NCAA football fan they’ll have to get used to seeing players on the way up then go to the biggest markets. But if it does away with losing on purpose it’ll be worth the heartache it’s causing Adam Silver and his fellow commissioners.

The bus is leaving the station. It’s just a question of who will be left behind when all the seats are filled.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft YearsIn NHL History, , his new book with his son Evan, was voted the eighth best professional hockey book of by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted seventh best, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

No, Really. Carney Is An Outsider. And Libs Are Done

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The recent appearance of Liberal-leader-in-waiting Mark Carney on the Daily Show has delighted a small segment of the Canadian voting pool and enraged a goodly part as well. During his nuzzle session with a highly uncritical Jon Stewart Carney announced that he was running to replace Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and then prime minister for however long that lasts.

(If this distinction seems trivial we would recall that then-CBC vice president Kirstine Stewart once upbraided us for saying her actor husband was supporting Trudeau’s bid to be PM. A choleric Stewart said we’d got the story wrong. How so, we asked? He’s supporting him to be Liberal leader, she thundered. Not the PM. As if this were a distinction worth making.)

Back to Carney. To understand the gravity of his announcement on the Daily Show one must remember that for a generation of concussed Liberals and NDP hacks Stewart’s show from 1999 to 2016 was the Yankee Stadium of talk shows. In their estimation, Stewart was Reggie Jackson, mashing the fastball, while CBC’s At Issue panel was Jesus Ramirez, striking out on the curve in A Ball.

So for Stewart to grant time to an unknown Canadian banker who still thinks Greta Thunberg is relevant was intriguing. Or someone paid someone. In any event, the gotcha’ line from the chat was Carney, formerly governor of the Banks of Canada and the UK and now advisor to PMJT, repeating Stewart’s suggestion that he was the “outsider” in the race to succeed Trudeau.

For most sentient Canadians this was an epic humblebrag for the billionaire son of a former governor of the Bank of Canada whose wife does investment business with Trudeau eminence gris Gerry Butts. If Carney was an outsider what constituted an insider? It was to laugh.

Social media— that part not consumed by the visit of Alberta premier Danielle Smith and gadfly investor Kevin O’Leary to Mar A Lago— boiled with sarcasm and dismissal. Those wily Liberals aren’t going to fool us now, just as we are on the cusp of Pierre Poilievre taking power. No doubt Carney’s team— including PMJT— laughed in derision.

The Liberals culture club think that, if they could pass off Skippy as remotely capable, they can dress up Carney as an outsider for gullible Canadian voters.

But Carney may have accidentally have tripped over the truth. He is now an outsider. You see, the dotty Libs think the machine that selected/ elected Skippy in 2015 still works. CBC, G&M, Macleans, TorStar would decide the candidates and curate the process. Sadly for Butts, Telford and Skippy the Family Compact has been supplanted by social media both here and in the USA.

The turning point of Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential race was him pivoting away from the staged debates and ponderous Sunday morning shows of legacy media toward not just podcasts by Joe Rogan but also those of under-30 stars such as Theo Von, Adin Ross and Lex Fridman, among many. The cred he gained from the Gen X demo helped him sweep the Dems away. Elon Musk breaking the DEMs censorship strategy on Twitter (now X) also sent a shot at Team Kamala that the game had changed.

While Canada doesn’t have as many counter-culture podcasts as the U.S., there are enough young voters ignoring Canada’s chattering class to bury the Libs under Carney or the rest of the Goof Troop. No one with a pulse and a vote under 50 buys the old rag bag. It’s over for guys as exciting as a carrot expecting to harvest younger Canadians. They’re playing to an empty hall with the bespoke Carney.

This ironic twist is that all this is lost on Woke nobs who brag about their hip sense of humour. Who follow Stewart and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to keep up with Trump Derangement. Who record SNL Update to hang on the sophomoric stylings of Michael Ché and Colin Jost. Who can recite extended bits from Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Now they are the punch line. The outrage over the Mar A Lago visit by Smith and O’Leary is a perfect example of their dissociative thinking. The staged pictures had “blood boiling” in many progressives. “@OrbitStudios Jan 13 So… Kevin O’Leary is arrested immediately for treason the next time he sets foot in Canada, correct? I’m absolutely being serious here.” And that’s a mild response.

These armies of Liberal bots fumed over the treachery of talking about the economy with the man about to become the U.S. president again. Awareness much? None of the howler monkeys reacted this way when heroes like PMJT and his cabinet burned clouds of carbon to lobby the eunuchs of WEF, EU and Davos in Europe. They were hot on selling out Canada to the globalist gang’s climate narrative, and they couldn’t get there quickly enough. Crickets from the bot community.

But this is different, of course. Sure. In the past their pals in the Ottawa Press Club could protect these hypocrisies, burying unfortunate stories by segueing to David Suzuki saving seals or Margaret Attwood decrying the medieval treatment of Canadian women in the 21st century.

But social media obliterated the insider game. So much so that Trudeau and his cabinet cronies began banning speech as fast as possible. But it’s too late. Like the ghost leg syndrome, the script to shove an unelected climate crazy into the PMO will seem real to the Libs. But don’t be fooled. The end is nigh for the old way. Just look at Stewart’s ratings to see just how dead it really is.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Think U.S. Hockey Model Works Best? Guess Again

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Canadians are still lamenting the pasting Team Canada absorbed at the World Junior Championships in Ottawa, won by the USA. Out of the medals, beaten by Latvia and Cechia, among others. There’s talk about the ongoing problems of the development system and the people at Hockey Canada.

Yes, Canada’s top eligible players (Macklin Celibrini, Connor Bedard) are in the NHL and unavailable to the team. And the massive feeder system— prospects spread out over the CHL, Junior A and NCAA— is inefficient at best. But the talent window is definitely narrowing.

As we wrote in August of 2021, “The hockey pipeline is full of young men whose fathers could give them a hockey education but who also knew many of right people to tap into. The sophisticated training and arduous diet regimes are getting more like Tom Brady and less like Gump Worsley. And they’re expensive— even in Howe’s home nation of Canada which honours its roots.”

What might be of interest is that people in the development system of American hockey are similarly distressed about the problems of developing players in their country. Cost, bureaucracy and the sheer time commitment for families is breaking a lot of people. “This discipline and access is reflected in the United States where the boom in hockey participation is resulting not in farm boys and rink rats but in privileged sons and daughters of highly paid NHL stars getting an inside track on making the league or the Olympics.” 

Topher Scott of The Hockey Think tank.com has posted about what he sees in American hockey culture. “I’ve talked to so many people in youth hockey about how to change the toxic culture – and it’s tough hearing so many good people saying they can’t do it the way they want (the right way) because everyone else is doing it the other way (the business way) and if they don’t do it that way they’ll lose their club.

I’m calling BS. If you are involved in youth hockey, please listen to this clip. And if you are a person of influence wherever you are at, stand tall and don’t cater to the crazy. The only way we’ll see positive change is if people of influence in youth hockey areas, who know better, go against the grain and lead the change.”

The comments on his post are familiar in the burgeoning hockey system that now has roots in most states in the U.S. “Such a scam to charge these families 5/6k in dues per year and then pay another 10/20/30k in travel expenses.”

—“It’s an arms race and you are not going to stop that. Make it fun for the other 90% of kids and families that aren’t part of the arms race.”

—“This system beyond broken. Organizations telling some kids In the contract we have the right to put you on the lower team, as we may find other players to replace you, along w/ we are flying players in to play.”

—“U14 has kids who live in central USA playing on east coast teams. Nj pa and ny loaded w aaa programs, many refuse to play each other because of rankings”.

—“…the hockey culture DOES not like disruptors- they are a THREAT to exposing bad things & bad people. Loss of power, control, money & damaging adult egos trumps what is best for kids.”

—“I find it unbelievable that travel hockey programs demand kids miss Fri and Monday school days to play wraparound weekend tournaments 5X/yr or risk being thrown off the team. Its gotta stop!”

Scott and his X followers are describing the same issues affecting hockey in Canada where a number of financial and social changes have created a system dominated by clubs, agents, schools and ambitious parents. The image he presents of the overbearing parent— in concert with team officials— who are stage managing a child’s progress is familiar. One that dictates needing to take out a mortgage to create a young hockey star.

As we have written recently, the NCAA decision to now allow players with service in the CHL to play at the U.S. college level has accelerated the meat grinder of development hockey in Canada. Again, delusional parents are now demanding that their child have extra ice time and a prime spot on a team so as to qualify for a pro career. Adding to the pressure is the NIL program now radically restructuring college sports in the U.S. After winning the rights to name, likeness and image in the U.S. Supreme Court athletes can now be paid millions in some cases to attend a certain school or transfer through the “portal” system,.

While NIL has not hit hockey as dramatically as other sports, it’s just a matter of time till schools wanting the next Connor Bedard to attend their school will be tossing alumni and sponsor money to over-18 prodigies. Parents seeing this will re-double efforts at the minor level to get their child on the prospect track, paying vast amounts for training and travel.

One problem in Canada, as mentioned, is the vast network of teams demanding players on the men’s side. For prospects to star on the first line or in goal there must be others to play on the third line or be a seventh defenceman. This creates a meat grinder. While clubs sometimes level with parents about ice time there are plenty who are in denial, hoping their son or daughter can still cash in on the riches in the NHL from the fringes of the roster.

Some of this has been alleviated by scholarships for players depending on their years in the system. Canadian University hockey is full of 22-26 year olds using their CHL grants to pursue education. But there are many who simply melt away to play in minor pro leagues across the country and in Europe.

In the long run this may make the CHL an elite league for under 18 players or those who can’t manage the scholastic record to switch to NCAA. The NHL likes the longer CHL schedule with its pro model, but there is much to be said for a prospect growing at an academic institution, broadening their horizons.

But, as always, parents will follow the money and the dream— even if they’re unattainable.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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