Race to NHL bottom for No. 1 draft pick

All seven clubs in position for shot at No. 1 prospect Auston Matthews

If the last NHL season brought us the Greatest Tank Ever Told, as Buffalo and Arizona furiously shovelled useful players overboard to improve their odds of drafting wonder- prospects Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel, then this season has produced a most unexpected sequel.

Tank Job II: National Treasure. OK, so it’s a working title.

With all seven of Canada’s teams among the bottom nine teams in the NHL heading into Thursday night’s play — quite a feat, when you think about it — the odds are suddenly very good that one of them will end up with the first overall pick in the 2016 draft. And that is no small prize: Auston Matthews, the 18- yearold from Arizona, is a superstar in the making whose draft stock has only been diminished by his proximity to McDavid and Eichel, two generational talents.

Matthews is such a talent that, when it came to the choice between the CHL and the NCAA, he bypassed both, signing a pro contract to play in the top Swiss league.

Despite missing a good chunk of the season to play in the world junior championship, Matthews is second in team scoring on Zurich, with 39 points in just 30 games, only five points behind Robert Nilsson, a 31- year- old who was once a first- round NHL draft pick.

Just last season, Matthews was on the U. S. national under- 18 team; now he is the best player, on a points- per- game basis, in one of the top pro leagues outside North America. He’s silly good. And now Canada’s teams, most of them quite by accident, are lining up nicely to get him.

If the season had ended Feb. 4, Columbus would have had the best shot at drafting Matthews, a 20 per cent chance in the new lottery system being deployed this season. The Blue Jackets have just 43 points through 52 games.

After Columbus, it is a whole lot of Canada on the NHL’s bottom rung: Edmonton, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, with only Buffalo wedged in between the Maple Leafs and the Jets in the race to be worst. The draft- lottery odds for those teams range from 13.5 per cent to five per cent.

But those probabilities are not the best indicators, because the season does not, much as the Canadiens might hope, end on Feb. 4.

There remains two- plus months of hockey, and some teams are trending up while others are going in the opposite direction.

Micah Blake McCurdy, a mathematician whose work is published at hockeyviz. com, runs simulations that predict the outcomes of remaining games based on recent form. Recent form, crucially, is not wins and losses but based on statistics such as puck possession, shooting and save percentages, which are better predictors of future performance than wins or losses are.

His model, which also factors in the lottery odds, gives Columbus a 14 per cent shot at the top pick, then Buffalo ( 12 per cent), Edmonton ( 11 per cent), Winnipeg ( eight per cent), Toronto ( seven per cent), Vancouver ( seven per cent), Calgary ( six per cent), Ottawa ( six per cent) and Montreal ( four per cent).

Note that Toronto, which is the only one of the Canadian teams that entered this season with an obvious plan to not contend for a playoff spot, is just barely ahead of Montreal in the Matthews derby, even though the Canadiens looked like a Stanley Cup contender just a couple of months ago, and bunched amid the rest of the Canadian teams that made the playoffs last year.

Edmonton fans could be forgiven for reclining and patting their bellies happily, knowing that the Oilers have supernatural luck with draft lotteries. ( Side note: One of the commentators on a hockey broadcast recently noted that the odds were stacked against Edmonton’s winning the lottery again. This is not how probability works. The Oilers’ lottery odds are their lottery odds, regardless of what happened in previous years.)

None of those odds for securing the first pick are particularly enticing, so it’s unlikely that the Canadian teams will match last season’s efforts by Buffalo and Arizona to get dramatically worse. ( The Sabres kept the roster intact through a 14- game losing streak and then traded both goalies; the Coyotes moved two of their leading scorers at the deadline.)

But maybe they should. Consider that, according to McCurdy’s simulations, Winnipeg has a nine per cent chance of making the playoffs in the West. The Jets, meanwhile, have a 39 per cent chance of picking in the top five of the draft, even after the lotteries — there are actually three of them this year — are factored in.

Calgary has a 15 per cent shot at the playoffs and a 33 per cent chance at a top- five pick. The disparity is similar for all of the Canadian teams, save Montreal and Ottawa, which have low chances for both the playoffs and the top pick.

It seems clear in which direction most of these teams should aim for the remainder of the year — down — though many won’t. The Oilers have McDavid back, and maybe that is the spark they need. The other Canadian teams, having been to the playoffs so recently, are unlikely to give up on a return visit so early.

And then there’s the Leafs, biding their time until they can trade some veterans at the deadline. A seven per cent shot at Matthews entering Thursday night, but likely to be much higher before the season is out.