NHL’s first decentralized draft is a logistical challenge to make the event fit for TV

NHL teams for the first time in a non-pandemic environment will not be gathering in one place for the draft, and the mind-boggling logistics of decentralizing the annual event are right up Steve Mayer’s alley.

The league’s president of content and events has masterminded how to put on outdoor games, All-Star weekends, the Stanley Cup Final in a bubble and last year’s draft at the Sphere. Holding a smaller get-together at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles with similar pageantry and coordination between 32 teams spread across North America has become his department’s next big challenge.

“We thought this would be simpler, and it’s actually become way more complicated,” Mayer said Tuesday from LA. “Everything has to be spot on. It was so much easier when you can look at table No. 6 and they were making their pick and it was easy. I just think this is way more complicated than it had been in the past.”

Commissioner Gary Bettman will be on site, along with nearly 100 of the top prospects, 32 of whom will be selected in the first round Friday night and the others expected to hear their names called Saturday when the draft resumes.

Then there are 90-plus remote cameras for the draft rooms in the various markets – including the Philadelphia Flyers setup down the shore in Atlantic City – and the guest selectors who will be announcing the picks, such as Jeremy Jackson and Marguerite Moreau of “Mighty Ducks” movie fame for the Anaheim Ducks.

There won’t be a crowd of more than 100,000 fans in attendance like the NFL draft, though the NHL is hoping to put on a different kind of spectacle that translates well to TV. That includes a virtual environment a player will walk into and be able to interact with the staff of the team that just picked him.

“They’re going to have a back-and-forth interaction with the kid they just drafted (and) the kid will have an opportunity to say a few words back at this group, which will be captured for television and it will be quite unique,” Mayer said. “That moment in that environment … is what I think will set us apart from the NBA and Major League Baseball and the NFL, to an extent.”

The NHL also gave itself a tough act to follow with the spectacle at the Sphere last year. That was a celebration of the last in-person draft (or so everyone thought) for a while, and the venue on the Las Vegas Strip stood out as the star.

This is nothing like a sequel, but some of the graphics that debuted in the Sphere will be back.

“We’re taking some of those same elements, as you’ll see, to give our environment depth,” Mayer said. “On television, I think it’ll look spectacular. Whether it’s decentralized, centralized, we don’t care. Just tell us what we need to do, and as an event team we’re willing and ready to pull it off.”

Pull it off now. But for how long?

Bettman has repeatedly said teams – not the league office – asked and then voted for the draft to be decentralized. There’s some regret about that, so decentralizing may be a one-off, one-year thing.

“If after this experience the clubs say, ‘You know what, on second thought let’s go back to the old format,’ we’ll do that,” Bettman said in Edmonton at the final. “What we do will be totally in response to what the clubs tell us they want.”

Club officials aren’t quite sure what they want. This will be Washington Capitals assistant general manager Ross Mahoney’s 28th NHL draft, and he compares it to the virtual ones in 2020 and ’21.

“It gives you more freedom to talk,” Mahoney said. “When you’re on the draft floor, the next table’s right here with scouts on other teams and that, so I guess it gives us a lot more freedom to speak freely and talk about things. But yeah we’ll have a better idea after Saturday.”

Mathieu Darche, GM of the New York Islanders who have the No. 1 pick, enjoys being on the draft floor with everyone in the same city. Maybe he’ll get his wish next year, but he’s fine with this as he runs a team for the first time.

“I’m comfortable with both situations,” Darche said. “Whatever the league decides, I’ll be doing my job.”