Consider Alan May among those skeptical that the 2020 NHL Draft Lottery was on the up and up.
Monday's draft lottery saw the number one selection in October's NHL Draft go to the New York Rangers, and thus the right to draft Canadian superstar Alexis Lafreniere, the 18-year-old left winger and captain of Rimouski Océanic, of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.
"I'm not normally in on conspiracy theories," May told The Sports Junkies during his weekly appearance, driven by AAA. "But yesterday, didn't that ball drop and stick to the side of the machine as well? Before it happened, they were putting those eight ping-pong balls in."
"The New York Ranger ball looks like it falls on the side and somehow sticks to the machine," he said. "So I'm just saying what I saw, repeating my view of what happened and it's just funny how that all of a sudden kind of happened, that a ping-pong ball, the one that doesn't go in, just kind of takes off on its own.
"You know what? The Rangers got the French kid. I guess good for them. They'll be really good in a couple of years. He's an excellent hockey player, but, oh my God, I couldn't believe I saw what happened."
The reason there's such a stir over the lottery, first and foremost, is because the chances of the Rangers arriving at the top pick, after both phases of the draft lottery (the initial phase was in June), were absolutely astronomical. SB Nation calculated them at 0.0031 percent.
Fueling the conspiracy theory even further is the controversy that arose as the eight balls were dropped into the hopper.
The Ernst & Young official responsible for placing the balls into the hopper inadvertently dropped the Rangers' ball in prematurely, and the conspiracy theory alleges that's because that ball was weighted more heavily than the other ball, catching the official by surprise and causing the ball to slip from his finger tips.
Asked if there's any way for a sports league to stage a draft lottery without some sort of controversy arising, May replied, "There's people that, no matter what happens, even if they were picking it, they would say it's rigged. I was just messing with everybody."
"But that ping-pong ball did stick to the side of the machine," he insisted. "That's the one they dropped. Was it because it was too heavy? I'm not sure. Or it had a magnet in it, so when that little ping-pong vacuum also had a magnet in it, I don't know. I'm just saying what I saw."
