On Friday night we found out who will be picking first overall and getting Alex Lafreniere. Congratulations to Team E! Team E had a 2.5% chance of winning the lottery. What was Team E’s lucky charm? Well we don’t know because we don’t know who the hell Team E actually is. NHL gonna NHL.

Team E could be the Pittsburgh Penguins, but we will only know if they lose to the Montreal Canadiens in the first playoff round or whatever they want to call it. All teams who lose their five game series will have a 12.5% to win the top overall pick. Yes, it is as dumb as it sounds. This league can’t help themselves, but come up with the most convoluted solutions to simple situations. The #1 pick should have only been available to the eight teams not involved with the playoff system. There was no reason to complicate things in the complicated pandemic landscape.

If the qualifying round isn’t played, and things don’t look great on that front, then the bottom eight teams (four from each Conference) will be in the drawing: Columbus, Florida, the New York Rangers, Winnipeg, Minnesota, Arizona, Chicago and Montreal.

There were definite losers in this process. The Detroit Red Wings are allergic to winning a draft. They are great at dropping multiple spots in a draft. In the last five years nobody has dropped more spots than Detroit (-8). Detroit would have been no worse than the second pick in the old lottery format and if the league ever went to Gold Drafting they would have won the first overall pick this year. Instead they are back to four overall.

The Sabres are taking losses on the ice, in the news, and in the lottery. They finished with the eighth overall selection (again) which was the worst possible finish for them. Hopefully they do a little better than their last three #8 overall picks such as Rasmus Ristolainen, Alex Nylander, and Casey Mittelstadt.

The winners of the lottery are the losers of the qualifying round. A 12.5% chance is way better than anything they were going to get in this lottery.

The Los Angeles Kings already have one of the best prospect pools in the league. Adding Quinton Byfield is only going to improve their rebuild situation.

My wish is for this to play out and piss off the most people possible because it is all so stupid to begin with. Something like the Penguins winning the pick, or the Bruins, Maple Leafs, Blackhawks, Golden Knights, or the Oilers. Well, not the Oilers, they don’t deserve it and Lafreniere doesn’t deserve it like Connor McDavid didn’t deserve it. You get what I’m saying. When the NHL plays stupid games they deserve to get stupid results.

At least the NHL draft lottery isn’t negatively impacting anybody’s health. I can’t say that with confidence about their plans to restart the league.

Thanks for reading!

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