No.
The answer to the headline’s question is no: no other North American professional sports league is going to eliminate their draft. Drafts are too central to the ability of teams to control players, of trying to balance the talent across the league, and suppressing salaries. Might as well as for the leagues to handover ownership to the players, or for RFK jr. to pet a bear. But I still think the fact that one has done so can shed some light on the way capitalism in this country is very socialistic, at least on the scale of corporations.
For those who are not sports fans (and are therefore more likely to be happy than those of us who are. Yes, I am a White Sox fan, why do you ask?), drafts are a means of controlling where new entrants to the league can play. The worse a team is, the more likely it is to draft early in the process (some leagues have weighted lotteries to determine draft order; some just draft from worst team to championship team order) and thus, in theory, get the best players. That in turn, in theory, helps the bad teams become competitive, boosting interest in the entire league.
Lots of in theories in that paragraph, of course. Your general manager must still be competent, and sometimes one draft year is better than another. As a Blackhawks fan, for example, I was happy they had the first pick last year instead of this year, since Connor Bedard appears to be a potentially generational player. You’ll note, though, that the biggest advantage is control of the player. Bedard has to play for the Blackhawks for at least three years if he wishes to play in the NHL. He cannot force teams to bid for his prodigious services, and thus his salary, and indirectly all other salaries, are suppressed.
This setup is an indication that teams in the individual leagues do not really compete amongst themselves. The Chicago Blackhawks, for example, are a rich franchise and could plausibly rebuild, absent a draft, by outbidding other teams for the best young players each year. But that would limit their profits, both because they would drive salaries up. Hence, the insistence in the collective bargaining agreement with the players on a draft and set salaries for players that enter via the draft.
This is not how other sports leagues operate. They are not necessarily paragons of player freedom, but where a player starts his or her career is more often tied to their desires than the teams. I won’t get into the details here, but even when a team transfers a player to another team, the player must still approve and agree to a contract with his new team in most circumstances. That is how the National Women’d Soccer League will operate going forward.
Okay, now that I have bored you with sports minutiae, what’s the point? There is not much of one other than how the concept of a sports draft highlights how socialistic American capitalism is, at least for the capitalists. When you work in a corporation, you are arguably in a command-and-control situation: almost all decisions are made by a handful of people with limited views into the reality of the situation on the ground and little to no input from people closer to the actual business functions. When a large enough corporation fails and requires a bailout to avoid damaging the larger economy, the government pretty much just hands them the money and does not simply take over the business. And, of course, large corporations are rabidly anti-anti-trust. In the words of Peter Thiel, venture capitalist and wanna-be vampire, “competition is for losers.”
It is not, of course. It is the heartbeat of an economy that functions for society and not just the capital owners. The draft/no-draft conversation is just an illustrative microcosm of the completing world view. North American leagues claim they could not survive without a draft, despite the fact that the world’s most popular sport, soccer, and the most popular leagues in that sport do not have a draft. They compete for players much more directly than American leagues do and yet still thrive. The NWSL’s move away from a draft is an indication that things do not have to be the way they have always been, that the economy does not have to be run on the idea that “competition is for losers”. A better, or at least fairer, way is possible.
Still glad the Hawks got Bedard, though. The lure of championships makes hypocrites of us all.
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