Is the decentralized draft here to stay for the NHL?
Based on what NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said on The FAN Morning Show on Friday, it would come as no surprise if the league does not bring everyone together to the draft for a second year in a row in 2026.
The league has been polling clubs on their thoughts in the aftermath of last month's decentralized draft. Many of the top picks were in Los Angeles, where the league staged its television broadcast, but club personnel remained in their home markets.
The NHL was unique prior to this year in putting everyone under one roof. The NBA and NFL drafts have been decentralized for years.
"What I will say is we continue to see support for a decentralized draft (from the clubs)," Daly said in an interview with Daniele Franceschi and Zack Bodenstein.
"A lot of the issues seem to be having efficient access to your hockey operations personnel in kind of a quiet, businesslike setting. I think our clubs take the draft very, very seriously, as they should. It goes to kind of define the future of the franchise, making good decisions and the right decisions from a team standpoint in a draft context. Given how crowded the end of our season has become with all the obligations clubs, managers and players have toward the very end of the season leading up to free agency, I think the efficiency of not having to travel to a central location is something that's very appealing to a number of our clubs.
"We'll gather that information (from polling), we'll process it and we'll make decisions with respect to what next year looks like. I guess what I'll leave you with is a lot of the reasons for going to the decentralized draft have been reasserted in the context of polling (from) what we saw two weeks ago."
Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman reported Thursday he had heard that the majority of clubs to have voted in the poll are in favour of staying with the decentralized draft.
This year's first round went over four hours, and Daly said he believes there's an "easy fix" to shorten it with some work on the production.
The push to decentralize for the 2025 version came from the individual franchises.
"When we initially made the decision and announcement we were going to a decentralized draft, a lot of people felt that was the league's initiative. Quite frankly, to the contrary, it was at the clubs' initiative," he said. "We heard from a number of clubs and we took a vote, a straw poll on the issue, and I'll tell you the commissioner and I were actually very surprised at the results of that straw poll. It was overwhelmingly in favour of a decentralized draft."
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