There may not be a frozen envelope involved, but conspiracy theories filled in conspiracy after the Rangers won the NHL Draft lottery Monday night and thus the right to select consensus top pick, introduced Canadian left-winger Alexis Lafreniere.
The Rangers and the seven other teams eliminated from the NHL playoff qualifiers this past week were entered into a live television lottery for the top spot in October’s concept, keeping ping-pong ball style. Normally, the NHL conducts its lottery process behind closed doors and publishes the results thereafter, as was the case in the first phase of the lottery in June, when it was decided that the top prize would be awarded to a team involved in the relegation. start of the league.
With Commissioner Gary Bettman looking at it, a masked employee of Ernst & Young, an accounting firm that holds the lottery, removed the ball every ball from an Attache case, showing it to Bettman who would wear the logo. verify and then place it in the lottery machine.
But the employee accidentally dropped the ball emblazoned with the Rangers logo in the machine first, leading players and fans on social media to suggest, without substantial evidence, that the ball was heavier than the other balls to make it a better to give shot when selected by the machine.
The employee quickly pulled the ball out of the machine, without restricting the other balls, and had to check Bettman before falling in again.
“The New York Rangers’ ball looks a bit heavy,” tweeted former NHL goalie Roberto Luongo.
‘I do not like how that man left the ball of the rangers there. Rigged ?? Rangers defender Anthony DeAngelo said.
The Rangers ball eventually emerged as the winner, giving her the chance to select the 18-year-old Lafreniere.
Others on social media likened the bizarre sequence of events to the 1985 NBA Draft Lottery, when it was theoretically frozen that an envelope with the Knicks logo was frozen so that then-Commissioner David Stern could easily pull it out of the lottery bin. the Knicks give the right to select Patrick Ewing. Stern denied that rumor effusively until the day he died on January 1, 2020.
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