DrSieb: Tank Nation!

I came up with an idea on hfboards once about how to make the end of the season count for something for cellar teams and simultaneously exciting for the fans. Because the last 10 games or so are always a writeoff for nearly half the league and that's bad for business.

The problem is that as soon as teams are eliminated from the playoffs, they have no further reason to try and win (other than they want to keep their jobs). But fans want them to lose so they can improve for next year. The NHL wants all 82 games of every team to be important. So there needs to be a new mechanism to make every game count toward something. How to do this?

Howabout introducing a new stat that I call the PAE stat: Points After Elimination. As soon as a team is mathematically eliminated, every game they play thereafter counts toward the PAE stat (since regular points don't mean anything anymore). The team that finishes first in the PAE stat gets the first overall pick in the draft. This way high draft picks must be earned, but only after a team has been eliminated from the playoffs first. No lottery -- teams are sorted by their PAE standings. Teams that have no PAE stats use their regular point standings, and are sorted with all the playoff teams accordingly.

Why this system works: The worst teams are going to be eligible for PAE accumulation first (some of them may even have up to 15-20 games to accrue PAE), but winning is the key to good draft position, not losing (and if they're losing so much they're out of the playoffs with 20 games to go it's not that much of an advantage anyway). Teams that are fighting for playoff spots until the bitter end won't have many games to accrue PAE and that's perfectly fine. The emphasis here is to make every game important whether you're fighting for a playoff spot or a draft pick.

I can see a few cons with this system -- for instance, if a team wants to game the season and lose purposely in January and February so they can enter PAE territory early, but I seriously can't see any team legitimately doing that. Entire teams/managements would clean house if they even thought about packing it in 40 games into the season.

Another con is that teams out of contention tend to bring up their prospects and AHL affiliates to give them some pro experience and make the rest of the season a teaching exercise. They won't do this if there's something worth fighting for under the PAE system, which might hurt player depth and experience (but then again, what kind of depth could the bottom feeding teams possibly have).

And it would probably result in less fire sales at trading deadlines if losing teams still have something to play for. They would rather keep their franchise players in order to win the PAE standings than sell them off for used puck bags.

But the pros far outweigh the cons. Instead of shutting down and coasting, Edmonton, Columbus and Montreal would still hustle in every game because they would all be working hard to win the Yakupov sweepstakes, and fans in all cities would still be interested because there's a new stat metric that they can look at every day that their team has a reasonable chance of winning.

Thoughts?