Draft (sports)
A draft is a process used in some countries and sports to allocate certain players to teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players. When a team selects a player, the team receives exclusive rights to sign that player to a contract, and no other team in the league may sign the player. The process is similar to round-robin item allocation.
The best-known type of draft is the entry draft, which is used to allocate players who have recently become eligible to play in a league. Depending on the sport, the players may come from college, high school or junior teams, or teams in other countries. An entry draft is intended to prevent expensive bidding wars for young talent and to ensure that no team can sign contracts with all of the best young players and make the league uncompetitive. To encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose first in the postseason draft, sometimes with a "lottery" factor in an attempt to discourage teams from tanking.
Other types of drafts include the expansion draft, in which a new team selects players from other teams in the league, and the dispersal draft, in which a league's surviving teams select players from the roster of a newly defunct franchise. Major professional sports leagues also have special contingency plans for rebuilding a team via a disaster draft, should an accident or other disaster kill or disable many players.
Drafts are usually permitted under antitrust or restraint of trade laws because they are included in collective bargaining agreements between leagues and labor unions representing players. These agreements generally stipulate that after a certain number of seasons, a player whose contract has expired becomes a free agent and can sign with any team. They also require minimum and sometimes maximum salaries for newly drafted players. Leagues may also allow teams to trade draft picks among each other in exchange for other draft picks or in exchange for players.
In 1935, National Football League president Joseph Carr instituted the NFL draft as a way to restrain teams' payrolls and reduce the dominance of the league's perennial contenders. It was adopted by the precursor of the National Basketball Association in 1947; by the National Hockey League in 1963; and by Major League Baseball in 1965, although draft systems had been used in baseball since the 19th century.
Major Indoor Lacrosse League adopted a collegiate draft in 1988, Major League Soccer in 2000, Major League Lacrosse in 2001, and Major League Rugby in 2020.
Sports drafts are uncommon outside the U.S. and Canada. Most professional football clubs and those in other sports obtain young players through transfers from smaller clubs or by developing youth players through their own academies. The youth system is operated directly by the teams themselves, who develop their players from childhood. Parity in these leagues is instead maintained through promotion and relegation, which automatically expels the weakest teams from a league in exchange for the strongest teams in the next lower league.
Australia
AFL draft
In Australian rules football's premier competition, the Australian Football League, a draft was introduced in 1986 when the competition was then known as the Victorian Football League. This was in response to the increasing transfer fees and player salaries at the time, which in combination with declining attendances, threatened to derail the league. It was also a result of the failure of country zoning, introduced in the late 1960s, which had led to a systematic inequality whereby the clubs with the best zones, like Carlton and Hawthorn, could dominate over clubs with poorer zones like Melbourne.In the AFL draft, clubs receive picks based on the position in which they finish on the ladder. Therefore, the teams that finish at the bottom of the AFL ladder will get the first draft picks. Also, any team that finishes in a low ladder position for consecutive seasons will receive priority picks.
The AFL's national draft is held in November, with a pre-season draft and a rookie draft held in December.
NRL draft
The 1991 NSWRL season featured the introduction of rugby league football's first draft system. The draft allowed teams to recruit players on a roster system based on where the club finished the previous year. It ran in reverse order with the wooden spooners getting first choice and the premiers last. The draft lasted just the one season before being defeated in the courts by players and coaches opposed to its limitations.Africa
SA20 Auction
Like the IPL the SA20 also has an auction where teams bid on players and subject a salary cap and restrictions on roster size. After the main auction takes place there is then a rookie draft where each team has two minutes to pick one rookie player that is 18–22 years of age. The team that finished last place in the last season is the first to pick and the team that finished first in the last season is the last to pick.Europe
KHL draft
When the Russian Superleague became the Kontinental Hockey League, the collective bargaining agreement between the KHL and its players introduced a draft, starting from the very first season of the league. It also allowed teams to use a first-round draft pick to select protected players from a team's farm system. The KHL Junior Draft was discontinued in 2016.The Hundred
A draft system is used for The Hundred, a professional franchise 100-ball cricket tournament in England and Wales run by the England and Wales Cricket Board, which started in 2021. The inaugural Hundred draft took place in October 2019.North America
CFL draft
The Canadian Football League holds its annual player drafts before the start of the season, either in the last days of April or the start of May. The league's drafts consists of two that occur on the same day: a larger main draft for Canadian players preceded by a smaller draft for "global" players.The main draft was formerly held as part of the annual league meetings in Hamilton, but is now typically held by conference call with the first two rounds being broadcast live on TSN. Since 2016, the main draft has consisted of eight rounds, with teams drafting in inverse order of their records in the previous season, with the Grey Cup runner-up selecting second-to-last and the Grey Cup champion selecting last. As with the NFL Draft, trading of picks is very common, meaning that a team will not necessarily have eight picks in a given draft. The draft main is restricted to Canadian citizens, plus non-citizens who were raised in Canada since childhood. Eligible players can be drafted both from U Sports football programs in Canada and U.S. college football programs.
Since 2019, players who are neither American nor Canadian, designated as "global players", are eligible for and subject to a smaller separate draft that occurs earlier in the morning before the main draft for Canadian players. This draft is structured like the main draft, but is not broadcast on television.
American players, which can compose up to half of a CFL team's roster, are not subject to a draft and enter the league by way of the negotiation list, a process that allows a CFL team to unilaterally stake claim to any international player on a first-come, first-served basis without the player's consent and bar them from negotiating with any other CFL team; this includes almost all of the league's quarterbacks.
Global T20 Canada
In the inaugural 2018 Global T20 Canada a player draft was held for franchises to choose the players from the available pool.NFL draft
Draft order in the NFL is determined in a reverse-record order. There are 7 rounds of the draft, so each team can have 7 selections, plus whatever compensatory selections a team receives as a result of free agency, and any picks awarded for developing minority candidates for NFL head coaching or general manager positions. Teams are allowed to trade draft picks among each other in exchange for other draft picks or in exchange for players.Because the NFL requires that players be three years removed from high school, and of the lack of an effective junior development system outside the college and university programs, players are chosen almost exclusively from National Collegiate Athletic Association college football programs.
The NFL draft has become one of the key events on the American football calendar, airing live on television each April. In recent years it had been held at New York's Radio City Music Hall, but in 2015 and 2016 it was held at Chicago's Auditorium Theatre, and in 2017 it was held on the Rocky Steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The 2018 draft was the first ever to be held at an NFL stadium, namely the Dallas Cowboys' AT&T Stadium.
NBA draft
The NBA draft, held historically in an NBA city, but in recent drafts in either a theater in the New York area or at the Barclays Center each summer, is only two rounds long. Instead of automatically granting the top pick to the worst team from the year before, the NBA holds a draft lottery to determine who chooses first. The top four picks are allocated by chance among the 14 teams that did not make the playoffs the year before. This discourages a team from losing on purpose to get a better draft pick, but also causes other controversies such as allegations and conspiracy theories suggesting that the draft lottery is rigged.NBA teams choose players from the NCAA and from teams overseas. It was formerly common for players to be chosen directly from high school, but in 2006, the NBA required that players wait a year after high school before playing in the NBA. Almost all top U.S. players thus play at least one year in college.
NHL Entry Draft
The NHL operates a seven-round off-season draft. Like the NBA, the NHL uses a lottery system to determine which team gets the top pick. All 16 teams, up from 15 between 2017 and 2021, that failed to qualify for the playoffs take part in the weighted lottery with the winner moving up to select first overall. Any North American player aged 18–20, and any overseas player aged 18–21 is eligible to be selected. Players are generally chosen from junior hockey teams, high schools, the NCAA and overseas clubs.The NHL rotates the draft's location among cities with teams in the league. Like baseball, players drafted in the entry draft usually have to wait a few years in development, either in junior hockey or the minor leagues, before cracking an NHL roster; usually, only one or two draft picks, generally, those that are widely predicted to be blue-chip superstars, jump directly from the draft to the NHL.
The league has incrementally expanded the draft lottery process over the course of the early 2010s to discourage "tanking"—the act of deliberately losing to get a better draft pick. Historically, the league only subjected the first overall pick to the draft lottery among the five worst teams in the league, meaning that if a draft had more than one marquee prospect, it would still be a viable strategy to tank, as a second overall pick was still guaranteed. This was made evident in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft, where marquee prospects Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel were both seen as NHL-ready and likely to be stars; much speculation surrounded the struggling Buffalo Sabres, who allegedly tanked to secure the rights to at least the second overall pick. From the 2016 to 2020 drafts, the top three overall picks were subject to lottery among all fourteen teams that did not make the playoffs, meaning the last-place team will only be assured of the fourth overall pick, at which point virtually any marquee prospect will have already been selected. Since the 2021 draft, only two draws are held for the first two selections. Starting with the 2022 lottery, the team winning one of the two lotteries is only allowed to move up a maximum of ten spots in the draft order and teams will only be allowed to win the lottery twice in a five-year period.
The three major junior leagues that make up the Canadian Hockey League also hold drafts of teenage players in their territories.