The 2025 NHL draft, which is moving to a decentralized format, will be held at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles in June, a source confirmed to ESPN.
The draft is scheduled for June 27 and 28 at the venue, which is across from Crypto.com Arena, home of the Los Angeles Kings. The event was last held in Los Angeles in 2010, when the Edmonton Oilers selected Taylor Hall first overall.
This will be the NHL’s first decentralized draft, a format used in the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball that has teams making selections from their own facilities rather than traveling to a central location and making them from the draft floor. Outside of two years during the COVID pandemic, the NHL has had a single location host the draft since 1963.
Initial plans for the decentralized draft had top prospects assembling in a mid-sized venue, along with a few team representatives and league executives. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman would announce each first-round pick and greet the draftee onstage.
It’s unclear how public access to the 2025 draft at the Peacock Theater will be facilitated, a source told ESPN.
Bettman has been a proponent of the format change.
“Families are going to be there, prospects are going to be there, we’re all going to be there,” Bettman said at the 2023 NHL board of governors meeting in Seattle. With more and more people with computers and data involved with the draft and doing that type of work on the floor, they were all more comfortable in their home environments.
Utah Hockey Club general manager Bill Armstrong told ESPN last season that the draft floor isn’t conducive to analysis.
“There’s noise at the draft. The telephones don’t work extremely well either. I think you can be more productive and more accurate when you’re in your own room with more information around you,” he said. “Also, you’re not worried about exposing your screens to anybody. There’s obviously more privacy.”
A decentralized draft is also more cost-effective. “One of the issues that you have with the draft is a huge expense of moving your staff there, and then a lot of your staff has to go back to development camps after that,” Armstrong said.
The NHL declined to comment. The news was first reported by The Fourth Period.
ESPN’s Ryan S. Clark contributed to this report.
