Pucking Rigged: Inside the NHL’s Backroom Gongshow of Lies and Lottery Balls
By now, you’ve probably seen it—like a slot machine in a rigged Vegas basement, the NHL Draft Lottery coughed up another miracle for a major-market team, and the faithful were told, once again, to shut up and clap. This time it was the New York Islanders, a middling franchise with all the charm of a DMV waiting room, leapfrogging nine teams with better odds to snatch the No. 1 pick. The fanbase screamed. The NHL shrugged. And somewhere in a windowless boardroom in Manhattan, a round of smug scotch toasts were poured.
Let’s be clear: not all conspiracy theories are lunatic babble. Some are just pattern recognition with good PR. The NHL wants us to believe that the draft lottery is a sacred ritual of chance and equity, an uncorrupted beacon of sportsmanship designed to elevate the downtrodden and reward patience. Bullshit. This system has all the transparency of a Vatican tax return.
How does the lottery work? Allegedly, 16 ping-pong balls get drawn in a private room under “supervision,” and then a smiling Gary Bettman walks out and tells us which teams “won.” The actual draw isn’t televised. We don’t see the balls. We don’t even see the goddamn machine. They could be drawing names out of a novelty Burger King crown for all we know. The only thing confirmed is that the NHL uses a convoluted algorithm to ensure two things:
That smaller market teams like Anaheim and San Jose get hosed.
That franchises in bigger, cash-hungry, TV-loving markets get just enough "luck" to stay financially interesting.
Ernst & Young supposedly oversees the process, which is rich, considering this is the same firm that oversaw the 2002 Oscars debacle and the 2017 Oscars envelope switcheroo. You’re not selling peace of mind—you’re selling plausible deniability.
Here's the dirty secret: the paranoia is the point. If the NHL lottery wasn’t rigged—or at least grotesquely flawed—you wouldn’t have a dozen thinkpieces every damn year insisting it’s not. You don’t see NBA fans lighting themselves on fire over their lottery. You don’t hear NFL fans shrieking for camera access to the pick draw. Only in the NHL does the league have to trot out self-appointed internet ombudsmen to desperately argue that, no, really, it’s totally fair, pinky swear.
I read one blogger last night, practically sweating through his keyboard, trying to justify the Islanders win, calling the real-time outrage “predictable.” You know what else is predictable? Billionaire owners getting richer while Anaheim, with its paper-thin roster and gaping rebuild, gets punched in the teeth and told it’s character-building.
The existence of these annual "debunking" columns is the smoking gun. No legitimate, functional lottery system should need this many damn footnotes.
So why fix it if it’s so broken? Because it works—for the suits. Top picks mean jerseys sold. TV eyeballs. Clicks. Sponsorships. The NHL isn’t a charity—it’s a money machine disguised as a sport. You don’t give Connor Bedard to Winnipeg. You give him to Chicago. Why? Because Chicago sells. Anaheim? They couldn’t sell out a free beer night. The NHL didn’t rig the draft for Chicago in 2023… they just didn’t let Anaheim win it. The outcome is the same, but the story has better optics.
And now, in 2025, the Isles—a desperate, cash-thirsty team wallowing in mediocrity—gets the golden ticket. They’re not tanking. They’re just… boring. Which, in the NHL’s eyes, is even worse. So here comes a miraculous No. 1 pick to jazz up the sizzle reel. And what’s left for the true bottom-feeders? A shrug and a copy of the league’s “Better Luck Next Year” press release.
What we’re watching isn’t sport—it’s theatre. And like any good production, it’s rigged for maximum spectacle. The lottery isn’t meant to help the worst teams—it’s designed to look like it might, just enough to keep you coming back, screaming into your Reddit echo chamber while the league cashes your season ticket renewal.
The NHL doesn’t need to rig the lottery with a smoking gun—it rigs it with opacity, with weighted odds and backroom drawings and public relations sleight of hand. It’s not corruption in the Nixonian sense—it’s Disneyfied dishonesty. It’s the illusion of fairness. An impenetrable privacy curtain with Gary Bettman pulling the levers like the Wizard of Oz.
So keep screaming, hockey fans. Keep writing your Reddit manifestos and tweeting your odds charts. You’re not wrong. You’re just not rich enough to matter. If you want justice, don’t look to the NHL draft. Look to pro wrestling—at least they admit it's scripted.