The 2024 NHL draft is shaping up to be a monumental event for the league and at least one team in particular.

After finishing with the worst record in the NHL, the Sharks won Tuesday night’s lottery, earning the No. 1 selection in next month’s draft and the right to choose consensus top pick Macklin Celebrini, a 17-year-old center from Boston University. “I would think so,” San Jose general manager Mike Grier said when asked whether his mind is already made up about choosing Celebrini. “When you put it all together, we think he’s in a good spot [to be NHL-ready].” This is the first No. 1 pick in franchise history, and the Sharks also have the No. 14 pick in the first round.

San Jose was 30th out of the NHL’s 32 teams in total attendance during the regular season, so the franchise will no doubt be hoping for a Connor Bedard–like impact that the Blackhawks saw with last year’s No. 1 pick. After winning the 2023 draft lottery and the right to select what many dubbed the best prospect in years, Chicago sold $5.2 million worth of season tickets in less than 24 hours. And despite finishing the season with the NHL’s second-worst record (and eventually the No. 2 pick in this year’s draft), the Blackhawks drew the fifth-most fans in the league, up from a ranking of 20th during the ’22–23 season.

Sports Meet the Sphere

Celebrini’s eventual selection by the Sharks will make history as it begins the draft, which will be the first sporting event at the Sphere in Las Vegas on June 28–29. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman officially confirmed the draft’s location Tuesday night on ESPN, although the move had been seen as a done deal for months. “Not a very well-kept secret,” Bettman admitted.

The draft will also mark the first event televised live from the $2.8 billion venue that seats 18,600 people. After the NHL’s festivities, sports will return to the Sphere in September, when the UFC will host a fight.

Each of the past three years, the NFL has announced its schedule on May 12, which this year falls on a Sunday; teams were broadly expecting the schedule to drop this week. But this year will be different.

An internal league memo Tuesday from NFL’s EVP of media distribution, Hans Schroeder, confirmed that schedules will come out May 15 at 8 p.m. ET, according to Sports Business Journal.

Schroeder didn’t give a reason for the delay, SBJ reported, but the most obvious explanation is that the league is adding two Christmas games (after long maintaining that it wouldn’t schedule Christmas games if the holiday fell on a Tuesday or Wednesday, as it does this year). Working out those details—including which teams will play, putting them in a doubleheader the Saturday beforehand; deciding the next week’s schedule; and sorting out which media partners will broadcast the games—likely required significant coordination on a short time crunch, considering news of the additions broke in late March.

Another explanation could be that the NFL wants to turn the schedule release into a much bigger, multiday affair, ProFootballTalk suggests. Imagine something akin to Selection Sunday, but carried out over several days, with each game time slot presented on a different day. The NFL is adept at creating tentpoles and generating interest throughout the offseason, as best exemplified by the draft, and this could be another iteration of that goal.

Teams already know their matchups, but they still don’t know the order in which they’ll play those games, on which dates, or at what times. In recent years, team social media accounts have gotten creative with their schedule release announcements, including by jokingly telling rival fans to get a job. Last year, teams created a viral release format wherein players’ young children (or people on Broadway, in Nashville) unveiled opponents by trying to guess team identities based on their logo.