It's playoff time in Olympic hockey. The women's semifinals are today with USA playing Sweden at 10:30 and Canada playing Switzerland at 3 pm. The medal games are on Thursday, a fairly surprising length of downtime.

The men's preliminaries are done, and all the complicated tie-breaking and angst over goal differential is over, and this is the order:

  1. Canada
  2. USA
  3. Slovakia
  4. Finland
  5. Switzerland
  6. Germany
  7. Sweden
  8. Czechia
  9. Denmark
  10. Latvia
  11. France
  12. Italy

The top four get two days off, and the bottom eight play off (five vs 12 and six vs 11 etc.) on Tuesday. Sweden, the author of their own misfortune, will play Latvia on Tuesday at 3 pm ET.

Canada plays the winner of the Czechia - Denmark match on Wednesday at 10:30 am. USA plays the winner of that Sweden - Latvia game at 3 pm the same day.

A couple of notes, Latvia is the only last-placed team not to finish with zero points. The tiebreaker between France and Italy came down to goals for, which France won by one goal scored. That is a pretty strong showing for Italy to be that competitive in this field.

In an interesting sort of news, this turned up, TSN piggybacking on the Athletic:

I would love to see the end of the NHL draft.

Look at this Olympics and at the NHL players here. No, not Connor McDavid or Auston Matthews, the normal high draft-pick players. Over and over again there is the same story. Well, that guy he was drafted by [insert name of team that tanked] and they were really bad for years, so he got some power play time and big minutes, and you know what that means.

Okay, no, most people think goals are things you manifest from your personal value and worth and you are a 30-goal guy or a 50-goal guy or a 10-goal guy, but goals are heavily dependent on ice time and power play usage and about six other things as well as your own skill.

So our Olympian friend, he scored a lot and then he didn't really live up to the hype when he was expected to help win actual games. Everyone got tired of him, and figured maybe he was a bust, and he started to wear the label of disappointment, and then suddenly he gets traded and boom, he's on a better team with players at a different level .... oh, hi Martin Necas, how are you? Or maybe his team managed to rapidly improve so it was only after four or five years in the NHL that anyone realized maybe he wasn't a bust. Nico Hischier, how you doing?

And that's what I hate about the draft.

Years ago when I still used social media, I said something during Men's Worlds about how Team Canada at Worlds was just a showcase of the elite players wasting their best years on bad teams. Hoo boy did the Oilers fans get mad. But really, why hasn't Connor McDavid picked up the team and carried them on his back and won six Cups? Because hockey doesn't work like that, and being bad accidentally (Leafs for the 2010s) is awful, being bad on purpose (Leafs in 2015-2016) is extremely boring and leads people to get angry about Byron Froese's ice time, and staying bad after the on-purpose part (Oilers, Sabres, Chicago, Arizona, etc.) ruins the game.

Mike Madano made some dumb remark about how Auston Matthews is under so much pressure in Toronto, it's so terrible, the attention, boo and hoo and etc. and David Alter had a great comeback:

Yes. Exactly. And what's that got to do with the draft? Well Chicago used to be a market in the range of Toronto's level. The Rangers are supposed to be a star-studded team drawing huge crowds and always a hot ticket. LA has made California hockey into a real event. Montréal is, of course, the closest thing to what Toronto is in this context.

All of those teams have been bad on purpose leading to being bad by accident, dragging the game down, making it boring and stupid and putting top players on crappy teams with ageing veterans until they're five or six years in and traded to Carolina or Vegas. And it's all because of the distribution of talent in hockey players.

If there were more second-tier players even, it wouldn't be so bad, but there's a cliff in talent in hockey from a small elite to a slightly less small nearly replacement level, and a short drop to the majority of the NHL who barely move the needle.

There's all sorts of wrong arguments against total free agency with no draft. Most of them amount to: A team I don't like might get a good player instead of my team.

There's one really right argument: People should get to decide their own path in life. Because, you know, not everything is about money.

What the NHL draft really does – if you step away from the gushing hype the binning of 32 guys into a bucket of "first-rounders" and all the outrageous ideas about how many drafted players ever play in the NHL at all – is fill up the AHL teams fairly evenly with not-quite NHLers where they are stranded by the RFA system until they're facing the downslope of their careers. Sure, the draft doles out a few unexpected good players to teams who aren't abjectly horrible, but it also consigns the elite of the elite teenage players to years in the wilderness.

It pays to remember that the Auston Matthews goes straight to the playoffs for nine years outcome is a very rare exception.

Total free agency at age 18 means players get to go where they want to go, and teams have to actually work at attracting them. And the same goes for the AHL. No more not bothering to put any money into it because the draft will just hand you a roster. You actually have to go find players. And pay them.

The other really good thing about abolishing the draft is it removes the draft-picks as trade-tokens economy and forces teams to make player moves in the here and now, not the future. And removing that concept of teams having a "window" and having to choose between a long dwindling decline and a better team today would completely alter the strategy of team building. It would be focused on the now, this season, these playoffs, these players.

Best part, you'd never have to hear me say picks are junk (they are) and I'd never have to hear you be all upset that the Leafs traded a first-rounder.

I know who agrees with me too. Agents. They love this idea. It will never happen.

Anyhow, wake me up when the NBA actually does it, because I doubt they will either.

Try to imagine player trades without draft picks though, it's kind of exciting to contemplate.

From The Branches