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2010 NHL Entry Draft: Draft lottery information

With one half of the NHL moving on the postseason, and focusing on their hopeful playoff success the rest of the losers NHL will turn their collective minds to the NHL Entry Draft.

The first step in this in the draft lottery, to determine the final draft position of the bottom 14 teams. It gives every team at least of chance of moving up four spots, and some teams even have a chance of getting the top pick. This is to discourage teams -- supposedly -- from tanking at the end of the season as they might not get the top pick anyways. I doubt any other team could have been as bad as the Oilers if they tried.

Here is the preliminary, and unofficial, draft order and the chances each team has of winning the lottery.

Image (1) DraftLottery-thumb-400x346-9263.jpg for post 868

The lottery will be held tomorrow night (Tuesday) at 8 p.m. EDT and will be carried live on Versus in the United States; on TSN in Canada.

Here are the basic parameters of the lottery:

-Teams may only move up a maximum of four spots; only the top (bottom) five teams have a chance of winning the number one overall pick.

-Teams may only drop one spot. So: if St. Louis wins the lottery (by some miracle), then the highest they can draft is 10th. Every team from 10-14 drops down one spot.

Generally, the top team in the lottery wins anyways. Although as bad as their season has gone, I wouldn’t doubt the Oilers lose this as well. Not a bad thing, exactly, since the top two picks in the draft are pretty much a toss up between Taylor Hall and Tyler Seguin.

Someone made a good note yesterday; odd that we keep seeing the same teams at the bottom of this draft over, and over, and over again. So much for rebuilding through the draft.