It's not fully random after seeds 1-4. I believe 5-8 occupy the same 4 spots in the draw, but they are random drawn across those spots. Then 9-16 is another random draw across 8 spots and so on. The randomness prevents players from seeing the same matchups all the time if their rankings were to stay the same. It also prevents match fixing to avoid or set a particular matchup. Say #30 matched up poorly against #3, so they deliberately lost a prior match to drop to 31 and get a different matchup. It would be bad for the sport if that was allowed to happen.
Leeny
joined 2 years ago
It's not quite that. It's the players from the PWHPA that will fill the teams, possibly management from the PHF is involved though. Almost none, if any, of the PHF players will get signed for the new league. The hockey will be great to watch but it's unfortunate how poorly they handled the end of the PHF...players signing 50-100+K contracts right up until the day the league folded. Harsh business i guess.