Draft (sports)
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A (sports) draft is a process by which professional sports teams select players not contracted to any team, often from colleges or amateur ranks. Baseball, American football, basketball, ice hockey, and some other predominantly North American sports utilize a draft system. The system is virtually unknown to European association football (soccer), where most professional clubs develop young players through their youth teams.
The National Football League's draft, which began in 1936, is probably the best known. Draft order in the NFL is determined in a reverse-record order (the previous season's worst team picking first, the Super Bowl winner picking last). Trading draft choices between teams is common practice.
The Major League Soccer draft is similar to the National Football League one.
The National Basketball Association and National Hockey League use draft systems similar to that of the NFL; however, these leagues conduct a draft lottery whereby the first several draft positions are ordered by random selection. This is designed to deter teams from deliberately playing poorly toward the end of a season in order to obtain a higher draft position.
The Major League Baseball draft is not nearly as reliable in terms of predicting player skill or prominence at the major league level as the other drafts. Players are drafted young, in comparison to the actual major leaguers. Unlike basketball or hockey, very few teenagers or twenty year-olds play in the majors. Instead, baseball utilizes a complex minor league system for their young draftees. Teams have four levels of minor league teams (Rookie, A, AA, and AAA, in ascending order of skill) into which a draftee arrives and is evaluated for promotion to the majors based on his performance in the minors, as well as other factors such as "signability" and other intangibles. Since players are often picked on potential and less on current ability, the first pick of the draft is not guaranteed to ever make the majors. In basketball and football, the top pick is all but assured a roster spot, and may times penciled in as a starter for that season or the next. This is not to say that the top pick of the baseball draft will not blossom into a star; Alex Rodriguez, Chipper Jones and Ken Griffey, Jr. were all top picks and each has won an MVP award. Fans often pay close attention to the draft selections made by teams they support, sometimes conducting their own mock drafts.
Other related forms of drafts are the expansion draft, in which a new team is allowed to pick a certain number of players from those of teams already in the league, and the dispersal draft, in which players contracted to a now-defunct team are allocated among the remaining ones.