One lucky team about to strike it very rich at NHL draft lottery

Whoever gets chance to draft McDavid should see their fortunes change dramatically

A twist of fate. The proverbial lucky bounce.

They happen in sports, which is why the well-worn sport-imitates-life clichè became a clichè in the first place. They also happen outside of the arena sometimes, momentous strokes of fortune that alter the landscape for a team or sometimes an entire sport.

Hockey is no stranger to these, although game- changers for organizations come along a little less than you might think, at least in the NHL.

Specifically, one player or one decision rarely turns the hockey world upside down, or massively alters the odds as to which club gets a leg up in the race for Lord Stanley’s chalice. But it happens. Occasionally. To whit: In March 1960, a minor hockey organizer in Parry Sound named Anthony Gilchrist pointed the Maple Leafs in the direction of 12-year-old Bobby Orr. The Leafs could have signed him, locked him up under the rules that then existed. “Too young,” replied the Leafs, then run by Punch Imlach and about to embark on a decade-long run that would bring four Cups to Toronto.

Instead, the Bruins locked up the legendary Orr, arguably the greatest player ever to play the sport, and went from losers to champions inside a decade.

In 1970, Buffalo and Vancouver joined the league as expansion teams. To decide which team would get the first pick in the amateur draft and the right to select centre Gilbert Perreault of the Montreal Jr. Canadiens, the NHL decided to use a roulette wheel.

After one spin, president Clarence Campbell thought the Canucks had won, but he was mistaken.

The Sabres got Perreault, and five years later they were in the Stanley Cup final against Philly.

Perreault played 1,191 regularseason games, scored 512 goals and is in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Vancouver picked Dale Tallon, more famous and successful as a hockey executive than he was as a player.

In 1979, the WHA’s Indianapolis Racers held the contract of 18-yearold Wayne Gretzky, but owner Nelson Skalbania had a case of the shorts. He offered to sell Gretzky to Michael Gobuty, owner of the Winnipeg Jets.

For a variety of reasons, including a negative assessment from his scouts, Gobuty passed. Peter Pocklington didn’t, and the Edmonton Oilers were able to keep Gretzky, who was never drafted, in the resulting merger with the NHL.

In December 1995, Montreal head coach Mario Tremblay, in a bizarre choice never really explained, left goalie Patrick Roy in the Canadiens net against Detroit for nine goals against. When a humiliated Roy, who had led the Habs to a Cup two years earlier, was finally pulled, he leaned past Tremblay on the bench and told president Ron Corey he would never play for the Habs again.

Four days later, he was traded to Colorado in a lopsided deal. The Avalanche won the Cup the following spring, and again in 2001.

In July 2005, the NHL held what is popularly referred to as the Sidney Crosby Lottery after a lockout wiped out the entire ’04-05 season. All 30 teams were assigned one, two or three balls, and the winning ball was plucked from a drum. Four teams — Pittsburgh, Columbus, Buffalo and the New York Rangers — had three balls, and the Penguins ball was selected. Recently bankrupt, Pittsburgh’s franchise was saved by getting Crosby.

Which brings us to Saturday and the 2015 NHL draft lottery, with 14 NHL clubs, including the Leafs, hoping fate tosses them a rose.

Like Orr, or Perreault, or Gretzky, or Roy, or Crosby, it seems pretty clear Connor McDavid is the same kind of universe-altering talent. Like Tallon in ’70 or Bobby Ryan in ’95, the second prize, Boston University centre Jack Eichel, is very highly regarded.

But most believe he’s just not McDavid.

So some team will be touched by kismet when the lottery is held Saturday night at Sportsnet’s Hockey Centre studio in the CBC building in downtown Toronto. Fourteen balls will be placed in a lottery machine, and four will be withdrawn randomly. The four-number series is matched against a chart that shows all possible combinations and — ta da! — some lucky team is the winner.

It could be last year’s Stanley Cup champions, the Los Angeles Kings. Or it could be the Sabres, who have the most eligible combinations and can only hope that 45 years after that lucky bounce on the roulette wheel, they get another.

And the Leafs? Well, it’s not about deserving anything, and surely hockey’s richest franchise no more deserves to win this lottery than Rob Ford deserves to be a director at the Hockey Hall of Fame.

But why not the Leafs this time, with this lottery? Why not give this suffering hockey city a break, 48 years after George Armstrong flipped a puck into an unguarded Montreal net to give the team its last Cup?

The Leafs’ chances of winning are less than 10 per cent, but Buffalo, which has the best odds, still has an 80 per cent chance of losing McDavid. You just get the feeling the Sabres won’t get their new star, that some other team — Arizona, Carolina, Edmonton — will get the nod from the gods.

Or the Leafs. Right now, they’re fourth in the draft order, and if they don’t win the lottery would either hold that spot on drop one place back to fifth. Even at No. 4 or No. 5, they’d end up with a strong young talent, a player like Boston College defenceman Noah Hanifin or Mississauga’s Dylan Strome, a teammate of McDavid’s in Erie.

Perhaps Leaf executive Mark Hunter, who drafted Mitch Marner for the London Knights and has watched him blossom into a scoring whiz, wouldn’t be able to resist Marner now. Or there’s Brandon defenceman Ivan Provorov, a Ray Bourque-like blueliner who landed in Manitoba from his native Russia after stops in Wilkes Barre, Pa., and Cedar Rapids, Mich. All good. But not McDavid. Imagine how he would change the landscape in Toronto after this train wreck of a season. McDavid is believed to be so good the Leafs’ burn-it-to-the-ground rebuilding strategy could immediately cease, and the opportunity to get much better quickly after a decade mostly spent in the wilderness would be at hand. This week’s Bloody Sunday, a day on which president Brendan Shanahan seemed to play whack-a-mole with hockey office employees, would suddenly seem more sensible, like it had been pre-ordained to prepare the organization for a new saviour.

Winning this lottery isn’t a reward that is earned, and as such, it seems quintessentially Leafian in design, the prize for a badly run franchise that has everything but just can’t get it right, a team with legions of fans but no ability to put all other distractions aside and just focus on finding its way back to the winner’s circle.

McDavid might, just maybe, tighten that focus. He would be, if the projections are correct, the first true Leaf superstar since Frank Mahovlich, with no slight intended to Darryl Sittler, Borje Salming or even, briefly, Doug Gilmour. Beyond that, he’d also be the first Leaf all-star calibre player from the larger Toronto area since, well, Carl Brewer? Charlie Conacher?

Even with double-digit NHL championships over the decades, Toronto hasn’t traditionally been a team blessed with single incendiary talents. Montreal had The Rocket. Detroit had Gordie Howe. Chicago had Bobby Hull. Boston had Orr, the Canadiens got Guy Lafleur, the Islanders had Mike Bossy, Edmonton had Gretzky and twice-blessed Pittsburgh had Mario Lemieux.

When will it be Toronto’s turn? Maybe never. But maybe Saturday.