“I do think we’re doing everything to make it pretty cool,” NHL’s president of content and events, Steve Mayer, said about the 2025 decentralized draft. Yet, there was something about watching the tomorrow’s NHL stars staring at a screen while talking to the teams that had picked them that didn’t go down well with the fans. It didn’t really help when some GMs, like Bill Zito, seemed to be on the fence about the whole thing.

“It checks and balances,” Zito told FloridaHockeyNow on June 28. The Florida Panthers’ general manager elaborated on his statement, highlighting the perks of each format. However, his response was diplomatic, unlike the many fans who took to social media to blast the decentralized format that felt like a Zoom call. Unfortunately, Elite Prospects’ Cam Robinson has more bad news for those fans.

“NHL GMs have now voted on re-centralizing the draft. While the league has yet to alert teams to the final results, it appears the majority have voted to keep it decentralized,” Robinson wrote about the GMs apparently going against the fans’ sentiment. “If that holds, what a miss,” added Robinson, hinting at how the GMs have failed to read the room or chose not to.

Then again, the NHL teams’ general managers made up their minds when they voted to decentralize the 2025 draft. Insider Frank Seravalli explained how the first vote turned out. “No idea why the NHL is taking bullets like this. Teams pleaded to try it this way, craving war room privacy and travel savings,” Servalli revealed back in March 2025. They even went against Gary Bettman’s advice.

“Against the commissioner’s advice, teams voted 26–6 to go to a decentralized Draft. So the league simply said, ‘your wish is my command.’ Blame the 26,” Frank Seravalli added. With that out of the way, this wasn’t the only sign that teams wanted decentralization to stay.

Detroit GM’s vocal support of NHL’s decentralization

While the 2025 Stanley Cup-winning GM Bill Zito took a more diplomatic approach, others didn’t hesitate to speak their mind. Among those who did was Detroit Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman, and he liked what he saw unfold at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. “Steve Yzerman remains a fan of the decentralized draft,” Elite Prospects’ Sean Shapiro explained on X.

“He said it felt like a calmer room/setup. Said tomorrow will probably drag on, but likes being in his offices and in his own confines,” added Shapiro. This is something Zito also pointed out as one of the advantages. “You can sit at your table. You can walk in and have sort of fuller conversations with the group without you standing on the railing looking at my PC,” said Zito.

The Panthers’ GM’s point was that thanks to a decentralized draft, other teams couldn’t snoop on which of the 92 prospects the Panthers were eyeing. Now, with Robinson revealing that the new vote won’t yield any different results, it seems the teams are looking at how they’ll benefit rather than how fans enjoy watching the centralized NHL draft.

This is also one of those rare occasions where seasoned NHL analyst Elliotte Friedman was wrong. After the public outcry against the 2025 draft, Friedman predicted that the decentralized draft was a “one-year flop.” While the Sportsnet analyst guessed that the NHL would go back to its old ways, that no longer seems to be the case. We may have just entered the decentralized draft era.