from Bruce Garrioch of the Ottawa Sun,

The decision to postpone the NHL draft scheduled for June 26-27 at the Bell Centre in Montreal didn’t come as a surprise because the league either expects to be playing hockey at that point or be unable to have large crowds in a rink — because the American Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Health Canada haven’t given the green light to hold large gatherings.

There has been idle chatter that if the league does decide to cancel the rest of the regular season and go to the playoffs that the format of the draft lottery may change. A check with a handful of league executives in the last couple of days indicates they don’t expect that to be the case and that the teams with the best odds in the lottery will retain those numbers whenever the league loads the balls into the machine....

“I don’t see any reason to change the format and I’m not sure it would even be given any consideration,” a league executive told this newspaper this week. “If they go straight to the playoffs, a good portion of the season has already been played and those teams at the bottom weren’t really going to gain much ground if the league hadn’t gone on pause.”

The sentiment from league executives I’ve spoken with is, just because the season might end up being shortened, it doesn’t mean you can arbitrarily just change the rules.

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