from Damien Cox of Sportsnet,

Fix the draft lottery? Of course not.

But if you could…well of course you’d give Connor McDavid to the Maple Leafs.

It’s tough sometimes to discern whether the NHL is a sports league or a business, but if it were pure business, putting the game’s next attraction in its biggest market would naturally provide the biggest boost possible.

This isn’t 1985 where everybody could just sit back and laugh at Harold Ballard and the Laffs. The way the NHL’s business is set up now it benefits the owners AND players to have Toronto maximizing it’s revenue potential, which clearly isn’t the case right now.

If the Leafs make more, the pie gets bigger, and both the league and the players get half of that. With Toronto out of the playoffs again this spring, TV ratings, for starters, will take a significant hit, which hurts the Leafs, the league and hits the players in their wallets as well.

Fix the draft? Of course not. But the league’s GMs will be discussing ways to present this year’s draft lottery in a different way over the next few days, and if one of the mock scenarios were to have McDavid land in a Leaf uniform, you can bet that Dave Nonis won’t be the only executive in the room thinking that would be good for business.

continue for more hockey topics...