America wrote:
I do see the appeal in baseball and basketball (I have absolutely no understanding of hockey other than put the ballpuck in the net)
I'd say hockey's closest relative is baseball in the sense that you have to manage a large gameday roster, decreasing cost controls, guaranteed contracts, and a developmental system (though instead of the six or seven levels to a baseball organization, it's more like two-and-a-half plus juniors/college/Europe as ad-hoc affiliates), but with the added wrinkle of a hard salary cap. If you make a mistake, it's almost prohibitively hard to get out of it.
It used to just be "buy everyone" in the glory days of the Rangers/Stars/Avs/Wings, and "have Wayne Gretzky" before that, but since the institution of the hard-cap system, the way to build a champion would seem to be by drafting high, drafting well, and finding any loophole in the cap system that you can. For the Hawks, this has meant frontloading Marian Hossa's contract, using Kane's long-term injury to field a playoff roster that went waaaay over the cap, and the weird 2013 lockout season where no one really knew how to calculate the cap that year, said "fuck it you guys can go over a little," and the Hawks went over a lot. The L.A. Kings didn't exploit a loophole so much as they happened to have general managers tell them "yeah, we'd love to give you the top two centers from the 14-playoff-game-winning 2010 Flyers in exchange for some random crap."
But most of all, you have to have high-achieving young players, and the way to do that is to get as many draft picks as you can, the higher, the better. Top picks are great, having depth picks is a must as well. Necessarily, this means sinking to the bottom to rise to the top, but the NHL keeps its salary floor so high (too high) that it's hard to truly gut a roster. Throw in the game's inherent randomness (another similarity with baseball) and it's hard to be flat-out 76ers-level awful. The Edmonton Oilers have been a dumpster fire for years now, but it's not part of some high-minded "process." They've been trying really hard to win, they just
don't.
But Oilers-style failure is why the NHL can't have The Process. Hockey just isn't popular enough for teams to financially withstand that kind of utter bottoming out. The Oilers got away with it for years because Northern Alberta has (now had) been filthy rich with oilsands money, the Oilers are a civic treasure because of Gretzky, and there's shit else to do in Edmonton. When you do a full-scale rebuild in South Florida with your over-reliance on visiting fans and your nonexistent TV revenue, you find yourself begging Broward County for a bailout, which they just got last week. Same deal with Columbus, Raleigh, Phoenix, Nashville. The Sixers have been the beneficiary of the NBA's giant TV contract and now I guess an even bigger TV contract in a year or two. They can crater their local revenues and not miss a beat. For this to happen in Salt Lake City or Sacramento would be annoying, but from Philadelphia, it feels like a bunch of Wall Street wizards figuring out a new way to walk all over generally accepted practices and fuck everyone over. Actually, that
is what it is.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm glad the NBA stepped in. The whole thing just feels like some sort of long con where every time they pick in the top 5 and the guy turns out not to be a generational talent, they start the cycle all over again, like they'll just keep drafting high forever with nothing to show for it. It's like the Marlins from 2004-2011, but with the added cynicism that comes from exploiting the whole "NBA regular season is pointless" trope. Maybe there should be a way to make the NBA season not pointless so that teams owned by hedgies can't game the system at the expense of the league's integrity. How much you wanna bet they sell after the new TV contract kicks in?
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.