NHL Draft lottery preparation guide

If you’ve found that you’re paying more attention to the NHL central scouting bureau rankings than to what your team is doing on the ice to wind up the season, chances are that your team is bound for the NHL Draft lottery. Here at PHT we understand that it can be difficult to understand just how, exactly that works out and it turned out that Aaron Portzline of Puck Rakers was right there to help everyone wrap their head around the goofball rules and math that go into the ping pong balls, from a Columbus perspective.

If you’ve got it in mind that this plays out exactly like the NBA Draft lottery - think again:

Here are the percentages chances for the five-worst clubs to win the No. 1 overall pick:

No. 1: 48.2 percent
No. 2: 18.8 percent
No. 3: 14.2 percent
No. 4: 10.7 percent
No. 5: 8.1 percent

Odds favor the Edmonton Oilers pretty well to get the top pick this summer at the draft. Whether Tyler Seguin or Taylor Hall will be their choice is yet to be determined. But what happens if say, by stroke of luck, a team outside of the top (bottom?) five wins the lottery?

If a club outside of the top 5 wins, they move up four spots from where they finished, everybody above that spot stays in line and everybody below where they land shifts down one spot.

So, no, the draft can’t get rigged for the Phoenix Coyotes (who own Calgary’s pick) but it can help them inch a little closer to the top. If you want to find a way to kill some time, the Edmonton Oilers website was kind enough to set up

their own NHL Draft lottery simulator so you can refresh all day long until your team gets the results they’re looking for.

Sorry Leafs fans, this too will leave you wildly unsatisfied.