With the Toronto Maple Leafs poised to finish last in the NHL and teams across the four major North American professional sports intentionally losing in order to secure the best possible draft picks, the popular narrative has become that “tanking” is the smart way to build a team, and that without high draft picks, it is impossible to build a successful team capable of winning a championship.
Fans are forced to suffer through a series of awful years based on promises of bright futures. There is some anecdotal evidence of the successfulness of this strategy, such as the Chicago Blackhawks and Pittsburgh Penguins, who (though not necessarily by design) spent a period of time as awful teams and were able to assemble the core of championship teams based on the high draft picks acquired. Contrary anecdotal evidence points to the Edmonton Oilers, a team that has been near the bottom of the NHL standings every year since 2009 and out of the playoffs every year since 2006.
To resolve this conflicting evidence, I decided to try to study the problem systematically. I decided to look at the twenty teams that won championships in the last five years in the four major professional sports and determine if at any point in the previous ten years they had been in the bottom ten in the standings of their leagues.
Starting with hockey, in the ten years prior to the Blackhawks’ most recent championship, they selected two players in the top five picks of the NHL draft. The prior winner, the LA Kings, had one such player on their roster for their most recent championship, though they had selected three players in the top five in that span. Each of these teams had the same number of such players the last time they won the championship as well. The Boston Bruins had one such player on their roster and had drafted two over the relevant span.
In basketball (the league in which the concept of tanking originated, and in which rumour has it that a single high draft pick can completely change the fortunes of a team), of the last five champions, only the Miami Heat have selected a player in the top five picks in the years prior to their championship. They selected two players in this range of the draft in that time span, but only one of these players was on either of their championship teams.
In baseball, the most recent champion, the Kansas City Royals, drafted a staggering seven players in the top five picks of the draft in the ten years prior to their championship season (not counting the draft that occurred during their championship season). Of them, five played on the Royals’ championship team while the others are still considered relatively promising minor league players. The only other team that has won a championship in the last five years while fielding any players who they drafted in the top five was the San Francisco Giants, winners in 2014 and 2012 (along with 2010, outside the timeframe of this discussion), and who did so while fielding the one player who they had drafted in the top five in this span.
In football, the most recent champion, the Denver Broncos, selected one player fitting my parameters and he played for them in the Super Bowl. The previous champion, the Seattle Seahawks, selected one player fitting these parameters but he no longer played for them by the time they won their championship. The New York Giants technically drafted one player who fits these rules, who did not play for them in their most recent Super Bowl. However, I say “technically” because after drafting Phillip Rivers first over all, they traded him for San Diego’s fourth overall pick, Eli Manning.
As these examples show, many championship teams in the four major sports receive key contributions from their high draft picks. But drafting in the top five is far from necessary for building a championship team. Given the large numbers of teams that select in the top five that never win a championship and the large numbers of teams that do not select in this range that do, it seems that high draft picks are neither necessary nor sufficient to create a winning team. Exactly half of the twenty teams considered had at least one player who they had selected in the top five of the draft over the previous ten years on their winning teams. Tanking may be a component of a viable strategy, but it is far from the only strategy and alone, it is clearly insufficient.
It should be acknowledged that this discussion was limited in several important ways. Firstly, the focus on only teams that win championships misses several teams which were able to utilize their high draft picks to build highly-competitive teams. Secondly, the limitation in number of years and number of picks considered may miss teams that picked highly-regarded players but not quite highly enough to be included in these criteria, or miss teams which selected highly-rated players more than ten years prior to their championship wins.
Given more time, it would be interesting to analyze the relationship between, say, where a team drafts, and their winning percentage over the next ten years. If the theory of tanking were to hold, the teams that finish at the bottom of the league in a given year would be likely to be better than the teams that finish in the middle of the league. But this discussion demonstrates that though high selections may be a better path to competitiveness than middling selections, they are no guarantee of catapulting a team to the upper echelons.