LOTTERY WINNERS AND LOSERS
No offence, Nolan Patrick, but the NHL draft lottery hit the post this time — especially for the poor ol’ Canucks, who had nasty flashbacks.
Take away the crowd of Canadian teams desperately scavenging for talent and the big-name teenagers, and the NHL draft lottery turns into something akin to waiting for your number to be called at the butcher.
Necessary for the sake of orderliness, but hardly worth televising.
The New Jersey Devils would differ, of course, after ending up with the No. 1 pick on Saturday night. But with Martin Brodeur long retired, there’s not much left worth watching in Newark and probably won’t be for a long time. If you’ve been around this game a while, you’ll remember the Devils were the most ignored team in hockey until Wayne Gretzky called them Mickey Mouse. Well, they’re back there again. Meanwhile, the results of the 2017 lottery, let’s face it, could have simply been reported in a news release by the NHL. It sure didn’t pack the punch of the 2015 or ’16 event, with no player close to Connor McDavid or Auston Matthews, let alone Jack (The Real GM) Eichel or Patrik Laine, available this June. As well, while the lottery last year delivered five of the top six picks to Canadian teams, this year only two Canadian teams ended up with selections in the top 15.
Take out the CanCon and this event packs the same punch as NHL trade deadline day before noon.
Really, the only noteworthy drama on Saturday night was the fate of the poor Vancouver Canucks, who have never had much luck at this sort of thing. Back in 1970, a spin of a roulette wheel at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal determined that they would pick second while their expansion cousins in Buffalo selected first, giving the Sabres a franchise centre in Gilbert Perreault while the Canucks were left to take defenceman Dale Tallon.
Even Tallon, a sharp talent man back in charge of the Florida Panthers, would tell you the Canucks lost that exchange rather badly.
Last year, the ’Nucks went into the lottery at No. 3. Instead of getting Matthews or Laine, they were bumped back to the fifth pick and ended up with a solid prospect in London Knights junior defenceman Olli Juolevi. Like ’70 all over again. This year, while the prizes at the top aren’t as desirable, Vancouver did even worse. After finishing 29th, they again lost the lottery and will again pick fifth in June.
Whatever lucky charm Canucks team president Trevor Linden carries around in his pocket, it’s got to go into the garbage. That is one star-crossed franchise, not to mention a team that’s only now seriously starting a rebuild that should have begun in earnest two years ago.
Sometimes you think that white towel Roger Neilson waved 35 years ago should be on the team crest.
“People don’t realize how lucky Toronto got (last year),” said Linden, noting the odds were only 24 per cent that his team would get the first or second pick.
“Am I upset? I’m not upset when I go to the grocery store and don’t buy a winning lottery ticket. It is what it is.”
Beyond Vancouver, which has never picked first in the draft, getting slapped across the face again, the ’17 lottery was a snoozy affair compared to the excitement of the past two years.
We did again learn that tanking doesn’t pay in the NHL, at least not every year. We’re not exactly sure that’s what Colorado was doing, but 22 wins in 82 games was pretty darn awful, leaving the Avalanche 21 points worse than the 30th-place Maple Leafs of last season.
How bad was Colorado’s 48 points? Well, consider that 20 teams had more than that in the 2012-13 season, and the league played only a 48-game schedule that year.
No matter what this year’s Avs were up to, they didn’t profit from it, as the lottery bumped them down to fourth in the draft. The big winner was Philadelphia, which finished 19th overall and was strong enough to win 10 straight games at one point this season. The Flyers used the lottery to jump all the way to second in the draft, and will get to draft either strapping Brandon centre Nolan Patrick or Swiss pivot Nico Hischier.
No Swiss player has ever gone higher than fifth (Nino Niederreiter, 2010) and we’ll see whether on draft day the Devils or Flyers have the conviction to take the shifty Hischier with one of the top two picks. Injuries, meanwhile, held Patrick to only 33 games this year, and if he’d been in last year’s draft he might not have been picked in the top five.
The general chatter is that it’s not a strong draft, but that may just mean there’s no franchise players at the top, like 2012 when Nail Yakupov went first and Ryan Murray second but the rest of the top 10 included Alex Galchenyuk, Morgan Rielly, Hampus Lindholm and Jacob Trouba.
That year, Tomas Hertl, Tom Wilson, Andrei Vasilevskiy, Cody Ceci, Olli Maatta, Brady Skjei and Tanner Pearson went in the second half of the first round, and the Leafs will be hoping it’s that kind of draft again.
For Mark Hunter, the Leafs’ draft guru, it’s the first time he’ll be picking outside the top five, and thus the first real serious test of whether he really is the genius some in the industry believe him to be. He’s looking pretty good for insisting on Mitch Marner ahead of Noah Hanifin two years ago, but that was a no-lose proposition.
This June, he’ll start from the No. 18 spot, from where it will be much more difficult to find a player who can help Toronto in the next three years.
Highly-touted players such as Eeli Tolvanen, Klim Kostin, Cal Foote (son of Adam) and Maxime Comtois have fallen in the rankings since last fall and now could represent an opportunity for sharp teams outside the top 10. A diminutive scorer such as five-foot-nine Kailer Yamamoto of the Spokane Chiefs might fit the profile of recent Leaf picks like Marner, Jeremy Bracco and Dmytro Timashov.
At this point, however, the expansion draft to “stock” the Vegas Golden Knights on June 21 might contain more intrigue than the entry draft starting two days later in Chicago. Without the teenage star power or the Canadian teams picking high at the United Center, it could be a rather sedate affair. Damien Cox is the co-host of Prime Time Sports on Sportsnet 590 The FAN. He spent nearly 30 years covering a variety of sports for The Star. Follow him @DamoSpin. His column appears Tuesday and Saturday.