Hairyducked Idiot

Fun fact: The NHL is a non-profit trade organization comprising 32 member businesses. It is not, itself, a business.

What's his motivation for doing that? He's equally employed by all 32 owners. Is he getting a kickback?

I don't know. You're doing what's called a "gish gallop." Youre making random, different points faster than they can be debunked.

The 2005 lottery was, in fact, done behind closed doors and unverifiable. Pittsburgh was one of the teams that had the best odds of winning it, but it can't be dismissed on that level the same way the 2023 can.

Let me flip that on you. Let's take it for granted that the NHL gifted Crosby to the Penguins in order to salvage a foundering franchise in what is currently the 26th largest media market (I don't have the market-size listings for 2005 on hand). Phoenix is the 10th-largest media market and is severely foundering in the same way Pittsburgh was. If they wanted Crosby in Pittsburgh for the reasons you've given, it would make infinitely more sense to want Bedard in Arizona for the exact same reasons. You're playing this insane "heads I win, tales you lose" game where no matter what happens, it just gets glommed into the bigger conspiracy, even if it contradicts elemetns already in the conspiracy.

I mean, ideally, you would have the slightest idea how NHL finances work *before* making these posts. Taking my word for it is just my second preference.

But what does that mean? I keep giving you really specific details and numbers about how the NHL operates, and you keep trying to talk as vaguely as possible. Your conspiracy theory requires a lot of very real, very rich people voluntarily accepting less money, which is not something very rich people are known for doing, especially not so that one of their rival rich people can get richer.

*Who* is leaving millions on the table? You keep talking about the NHL like it's a single person, but it's not.

Yeah Stroud looks so smooth. He's making it look effortless.

Offensive line is getting healthy. Fields played a basically perfect 3 quarters of football last week before the defense remembered they don't have to run soft man against him. There's just enough here to have something stupid happen like play ourselves out of the top pick or commit to Fields for year 4.

The blackhawks bring in about $225m/year in revenue. Let's say Bedard does something insane like boost a team's revenue by 40% (he doesn't, but I'm going absurdly over the top to make the point).. That means having Bedard in Chicago adds $90m/year in revenue to the league totals, whereas a poverty market Anaheim would only go from $150m to $210m. So Bedard in Chicago is worth $30m in extra revenue for the league. The Anaheim Ducks, assuming they stayed in the bottom 10 in revenue, would get a share from a pool equal to 6% of the league's total revenue, on average 0.6% (more or less depending on how low they finish in the revenue list, but that's the average). So if the Ducks were in on this conspiracy, the Ducks owner gave up a 25% chance at $60m/year in revenue in exchange for about $1.8m in extra revenue sharing. The Montreal Canadiens are about the same revenue level of the Blackhawks, so they would have had to have voluntarily given up their 8.5% chance at $60m/year for absolutely bupkis, they do not receive revenue sharing. So either, and you *have* to pick one of these: 1) Bettman went into business for himself with no personal motivation or stake to make the Chicago owner richer at the expense of 10 of his other bosses or 2) The other owners personally gave up millions of dollars in value for their own pockets in order to make the Chicago owner richer. Which is it?

You keep trying to reduce it to this vague "would a professional sport, somewhere, rig things for money." Sure they would. But we're talking about a very specific example and giving you very specfic details about why it specifically doesn't work in this case.

Watching those "every pass" videos for Stroud and Young each week. Maybe Young will snap it together at some point, but right now I just can't feel like we missed out at all. I don't believe he completed a single pass outside the numbers more than 5 yards down the field this week. He drops back and either hits a little dunker crossing route over the middle, or he checks down, that's his entire game. And there's no *way* you can convince me his height isn't causing him vision problems in the pocket.

Yep. Every poker hand in history, every lottery draw, has been insanely low odds, but one of them has to hit. What you're measuring when you do things like "these are the odds of edmonton winning all those picks" is actually measuring how likely it was for anything unlikely enough to warrant your notice happening, which is actually pretty damn likely.

That's pretty much the consensus here too. The owners really like the D-shield logo, they personally commissioned it, so we're stuck with it.

And I was telling Ducks fans the month leading up to the draft that they should hold off on the Fantilli jerseys because I thought Carlsson was equally plausible.

*shrug* I thought they were fairly equal prospects, and so did every prospect outlet until about 2 months before the draft when the Canadian press needed to fill some pixels.

NHL revenue sharing is relatively small. It's nothing compared to local arena money. Arizona, Anaheim, Montreal, all the other teams in the lottery, stood to make *many* times more millions of dollars from winning Bedard than they did from Bedard going to a large market and letting some tiny fraction of a percent trickle down in revenue sharing. So in order for this conspiracy to work, either the billionaire owners of all these clubs must have been feeling *really* generous. Or they weren't in on it, in which case Bettman went rogue for one specific billionaire owner employer over the rest of them, for unclear motivations. Is he getting a kickback in this theory?

Ironically, I'm more of an Anaheim fan than I am a Blackhawks fan these days. I grew up on the Blackhawks, but I live in Anaheim and have Ducks season tickets.

This is called moving the goalposts. I didn't say "sports never have conspiracies." I said this specific conspiracy doesn't hold up.

And once again, this whole "well there's millions of dollars at stake" fundamentally misunderstands how NHL finances work. The NHL isn't the NFL, where unified national TV deals make everyone rich. More than any other major north american pro sport, even more than baseball, the NHL is driven by local revenue. Arena revenue and local TV rights make up the lion's share of each teams' revenue. The NHL isn't a single entity trying to get rich for itself. The NHL is 32 seperate billionaires, each of which make far more money when a superstar is selling out their arena, taking them on playoff runs and selling merchandise in the physical team store. So in order for this conspiracy to work, 31 billionaires must be willing to say "you know what? I don't mind making less money so someone else can make more." Which is impossible because they wouldn't be billionaires if they were capable of that sentiment. The problem with this conspiracy theory isn't that people won't conspire to make money. The problem with this conspiracy theory is that its adherents can't come up with an *actual* coherent conspiracy that fits the facts, one that is plausible with both the mechanisms we've seen and the actual motivations of the people involved.

No, because I understand how probability works with regard to variance.

This is called overfitting. You wait until after something happens, then calculate how improbable it was. But you wouldn't have noticed it if you hadn't been looking for improbable things, and *something* improbable is always going to happen. This is devolving into vague nonsense the exact way most conspiracy theories do when examined. We've gone from the league rigging the Bedard draft because they want their superstars in large markets in TV friendly time zones, to the league rigging the draft for *Edmonton*, a Canadian city of less than 1 million people that plays home games in Mountain time and most of their divisional games in Pacific time.

I mean, to be fair, if you do put the ball in his hands, there's a decent chance the defense takes it out.

If it's a conspiracy when a player goes to a big market, and it's a conspiracy when they got to a struggling market, then there's not a lot of places left they can go where it's not a conspiracy.