Five games that changed the outcome of the 2025 draft lottery

Did you enjoy this year’s draft lottery? I did. I thought the new format for the broadcast, which featured the full draw happening live, was a major improvement. As much as I like to complain about the lottery, and occasionally suggest alternatives that would be way better, we appear to be stuck with what we’ve got. And if so, at least the league kind of nailed the presentation this year.

But while the NHL changed the broadcast, they didn’t change the underlying mechanism. That means they still assigned each team a group of combinations, based on their record. And that means that all those combinations, including the winning ones, were tied to a specific spot in the standings. And that means that shifting the teams that finished in the winning 19th and 23rd spots in the standings would have changed the results.

Which means… yep, we get to go looking for games that changed the lottery results.

This is a gimmick we break out every now and then, if and when the results allow it. Sometimes we get a drawing like last year, where the Sharks won the lottery after being five points worse than any other team. No game can give you a five-point swing, so there was no point looking any deeper. But this year, the lottery gods had a few surprises up their sleeves with those longshot wins for the Islanders and Utah, so we can have some fun with the results.

Well, “fun” might be relative here. Half the point is that this won’t be fun for certain fan bases, who may not realize just how close they came to a potentially franchise-altering draft pick. We’re trying to make you sad, here. It’s kind of our thing.

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Draft lottery power rankings: Who needs it, who deserves it, who is it rigged for?

We’re just a few hours from the moment when a barrel full of ping pong balls will determine the future of the NHL. Yes, there are better ways to determine a draft order, and even more entertaining options. But there’s something to be said for the simplicity of a lottery, and the dramatic tension of watching those cards flip over in real time.

It’s fair to say that hockey fans have learned to love lottery day… right up until they don’t.

That’s the gamble we’re all taking tonight. Whether your team is involved or not, you have your own ideas about who you’re rooting for or against, and the results may or may not match those hopes. By the end of the night, some fan base will be shopping for Macklin Celebrini jerseys, while others will be screaming about how unfair the whole thing is.

For now, let’s get calibrated with our annual draft lottery power rankings, in which we look at things from a few different angles.

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Puck Soup: What now for the Leafs

On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- Breaking down the Leaf's latest loss
- Checking on the second round
- The Seth Jones trade watch begins
- Which coaches will wind up where
- The draft lottery
- OUFL trail mix and more...

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The 2021 draft lottery power rankings

I’ve been doing my annual draft lottery power rankings for years now, and it’s usually one of my favorite columns to write. But I’ll admit that I toyed with the idea of skipping it this year. After all, what weird scenario could I possibly come up with that would even come close to last year’s real results? We had a lottery, then a team that was still playing won the top pick, but we didn’t know which team, and so we had a second lottery weeks later. It was awful, and also brilliant, the new gold standard by which all other lottery chaos will be measured.

This year is back to normal… kind of. There’s no risk of a playoff team winning or a sequel in a few weeks. But the league did decide to switch up the rules on us, so let’s do a quick refresher on how this works now.

The big change for this year is that we’re only drawing two teams now instead of the usual three. Two more changes – reducing how many spots a winning team can move up, and preventing teams from winning twice in a five-year period – don’t kick in until next season. As an added twist, don’t forget that Seattle has joined the fray. Oh, and for the first time since 2017, there’s some genuine intrigue around who’ll end up going number one.

You know what? We can work with this. If you want actual useful information, you can find the odds for each team here. If you want to get weird, keep reading.

The “Maximum Chaos” Ranking

Let’s lead off with one of my favorite categories. Team Chaos fans, unite.

Not ranked: Anaheim Ducks – They have the second-best odds, they’re legitimately bad, they’re pretty much committed to a rebuild… honestly, your friend would ask you who won a day later and you wouldn’t remember.

5. Buffalo Sabres – Most years, the team with the best lottery odds lands in the “not ranked” space. After all, what’s chaotic about the most likely outcome? But this year, after everything the Sabres have been through, you can’t help but wonder what might happen if they get the top pick. Would they forget to use it? Go back to what worked in the past and take Gilbert Perreault? Give it to the Bills, since they might actually get some use out of it? The mind boggles.

4. Vancouver, or one of the teams right around them – Longtime readers know I love to point out single games that changed the lottery results, and that last week of Canucks games that were played despite the playoffs already starting would be fertile ground for an “if only” scenario one way or another.

3. Any of the bottom five teams – Any of Chicago, Calgary, Philadelphia, Dallas or New York winning the draw for the top pick would be fun, because everyone will go “Ah, they can’t move up all the way to number one because of the new rules”, then realize that part doesn’t kick in until next year.

2. New Jersey Devils – Similar to the last entry, imagine having a team that’s already won two first overall picks in recent years win again, only to have everyone realize that the “you can’t win too often” rule also doesn’t start this year.

(By the way, shout out to the NHL for convincing itself it had specific problems, coming up with solutions to address those problems, and then intentionally delaying those fixes for a year. You can’t say this league isn’t on brand.)

1. Arizona Coyotes – They don’t have a first-round pick, as part of their punishment for breaking combine testing rules. But they’re still in the lottery, for reasons nobody seems quite clear on, which means that if they win, there’s a redraw.

Seriously, why are they in the drawing at all? Just take them out and adjust everyone else’s odds. The only explanation I can come up with is that the league wants there to be some small chance of the team knowing it cost itself the first pick, which is super mean and more than a little petty. I’m kind of here for it.

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Grab Bag: How to increase scoring without making the nets bigger, a draft lottery request, young Joe Thornton and friends, and more

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- So you want more scoring but won't make the nets bigger. Cool, I've got some idea...
- A simple request about the draft lottery debate
- An obscure player who may have gone to Alcatraz
- The three comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back at teenaged Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau and Roberto Luongo

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This is all your team’s fault: One part of the modern NHL to blame on every team (Eastern edition)

This is all your fault.

Well, not your fault, personally. But this is your favorite team’s fault, with “this” being… well, something. A rule, a tradition, a protocol, or something else that’s a part of the NHL. The sport is filled with little details that we’ve become used to over the years, and almost all of it has an origin story, and sometimes that story might involve your team. This week, we’re going to try to find one example for every team in the league.

In some cases, we’ll be talking about actual rules you can find in the rulebook. In others, we’ll be working with less formal guidelines, interpretations, traditions and unwritten rules that have evolved over time. We’ll cover big changes and tiny ones, the relatively new and the age-old, some good and some bad. Honestly, a few of these are just here because I want to tell you a weird story from the history books. But my goal here is to give every fan base something from today’s NHL that they can point to and say “Hey, that’s because of us”.

Thanks to reader Mason for sending in this idea. We’ll do the East today, and the West on Thursday.

Boston Bruins

Thank them for: Icing

This one’s a little hazy, because it goes all the way back to the 1930s. But apparently we can thank the Bruins for one of hockey’s oldest rules.

Here’s the story. In the NHL’s earlies days, there was no rule against a defending team relieving the pressure by just lofting the puck down the ice over and over. If that sounds like a problem, you agree with the Bruins, a newbie team that had been complaining about the situation since their very first home game in 1931. That came on December 8, 1931 against the New York Americans, who took a 3-2 decision thanks in part to their strategy of just firing the puck down the ice whenever it was in their zone, causing frustrated Boston fans to litter the ice with garbage and bottles. The Bruins retaliated in a rematch weeks later by icing it 89 times in the same game, including 42 in the first period of what ended up being a scoreless tie.

Because this was the NHL and it takes forever to make an obvious rule change, it wasn’t until 1937 that Bruins’ GM Art Ross finally convinced the league to pass a rule against the practice.

Ottawa Senators

Thank them for: The draft lottery

Do NHL teams tank? That depends on how you define tanking. Is it any team that goes into a season already resigned to being bad? Do they have to actively dismantle their roster? Keep key players out of the lineup? Or is it not a tank unless a team is actively throwing games? That can’t be it, because no NHL team would ever do that.

Or would they?

That’s the question that hangs over the 1992-93 Senators, thanks to owner Bruce Firestone. He reportedly made the claim after having a few pops around some local media, as revealed by Roy MacGregor.

The NHL investigated the claim, which was denied by everyone else involved, and ultimately didn’t find any proof it was true. Still, it quickly became clear that a lottery would be needed to avoid any future confusion over who was actually trying, and the lottery was brought in for 1995. As for the Senators, drafting Alexander Daigle with that 1993 first overall pick was probably punishment enough.

Montreal Canadiens

Thank them for: A powerplay goal ending a minor penalty

Sometimes you’re just too good. That was the problem from the 1950s Habs dynasty, one led by legendary names like Jean Beliveau, Rocket Richard, Doug Harvey and Boom Boom Geoffrion. They won five straight Cups, and as you might imagine given all that talent, their powerplay was unstoppable. A little bit too unstoppable, as it turns out.

Back in those days, a minor penalty mean a team stayed shorthanded for the full two minutes, even if their opponents scored on the powerplay. With the Habs frequently racking up two or three goals on one powerplay, the other teams decided they needed a change. At the 1956 board of governors meeting, the league votes five teams to one to change the rule to what we have today. I’ll let you guess which team was the one vote in favor of the status quo.

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Puck Soup: The way the ball bounces

In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We react to the draft lottery, which was rigged
- Thoughts on the Leafs losing when it matters, again
- Greg and Ryan make their picks for the next round
- And probably lots more, but I left early because I'm on vacation this week

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The chaos lover’s rooting guide to the playoffs and lottery

We finally know what the NHL will look like when the season resumes, and I have to say, I’m pretty sure my favorite team is set up to dominate.

No, not the Maple Leafs. I mean my other favorite team: Team Chaos.

I’ve been on the Team Chaos bandwagon for years, and they’ve come through with some pretty special seasons. There was “expansion team rolls over the league and makes the final,” and “terrible team takes Sidney Crosby’s dynasty to overtime in Game 7 of the conference final” and “128-point juggernaut gets swept in the first round.” Unlike some other teams I could mention, Team Chaos rarely lets me down.

But this year? This year could be something else. The league’s new format seems like it was designed by Team Chaos representatives. We’ve taken an unprecedented 24-team format with a postseason round that may or may not count as the playoffs and combined it with the potential for a double-lottery that could see one of the league’s best teams win the first overall pick despite finishing top ten in the standings. The potential scenarios in play boggle the mind.

We don’t even have to get into the real-world situations that could cause legitimate chaos, such as an outbreak of positive tests or players refusing to report. Let’s pretend that everything plays out exactly the way the league wants it to. That could still lead us down some truly bizarre paths.

Today, we’re going to explore some of those possibilities. Here are 15 of the weirdest scenarios I could come up with, and how appealing they would be to a diehard Team Chaos fan.

Scenario: Carey Price single-handedly wins the Cup

One of my favorite movie moments is the diner scene from “Mulholland Drive.” Two characters we don’t know meet for lunch and one of them, clearly disturbed, explains a nightmare he’s been having. In the dream, he walks out of the diner and down the alleyway behind it, at which point a horrifying figure appears and he dies. He wants to confront his fear by seeing what’s really back there — “to get rid of this god-awful feeling.” With his friend trailing him, the man gathers his courage. Then he walks out of the diner and down the alleyway behind it, at which point a horrifying figure appears and he dies.

The scene is terrifying because there’s no twist. There’s no misdirection. The movie tells you exactly what’s going to happen and why you should be afraid of it, and then it unfolds precisely as promised. And somehow, that makes it so much scarier than any surprise could have been.

The NHL version of the figure behind the diner is Carey Price, who is apparently the scariest goaltender in the world. He’s been mentioned by name in multiple objections to the play-in format. This despite the fact that it’s been years since the numbers suggest he’s been an elite goaltender, or even an especially good one. Forget about the stats or the standings or even what your own eyes tell you. Carey Price is the monster in your nightmare — and he’s going to get you.

And that means there’s nothing scarier than having all our fears turn out to be exactly right, as Price takes the ice and immediately Voltrons himself into 1986 Patrick Roy and 1971 Ken Dryden and 1984 Steve Penney and 2010 Jaroslav Halak and 1950s Jacques Plante, then goes five rounds without allowing a single goal while every GM in the league screams “I TOLD YOU SO” into the void.

Chaos meter: 80/100. This one’s pretty darn good, but there are so many other options that I have to leave some room at the top of the scale. Onwards …

Scenario: We get a Cup Final rematch between the Blues and Bruins

It’s been months since anyone looked at the standings, so it’s easy enough to forget that the Bruins and Blues had the best records in their conferences. In theory, if everything goes according to expectations, they’d meet again in the final.

Will everything go according to expectations? Not according to pretty much everyone; we’re all expecting plenty of upsets, thanks to short series and rusty teams. But maybe we get a curveball and just end up with a rematch of the classic seven-game 2019 Final. Only this time, in October instead of June.

It would result in a good matchup, but the timing would feel all wrong. Kind of like a Brad Marchand line change.

Chaos meter: 10/100. Would this be kind of cool? Sure. Would it be chaos? Let’s just say we can do a lot better.

Scenario: The Presidents’ Trophy champion Boston Bruins are the fourth seed in their own conference

This is the better Bruins’ scenario if you’re on the Team Chaos bandwagon.

Here’s a fun fact about history’s Presidents’ Trophy winners: They’ve always been the top seed, with home ice throughout the playoffs. They had to be; that was the only way it could work. But this year, thanks to the weird decision to let a three-game round robin determine the seeding for each conference’s top four teams, the Bruins could get off to a slow start, lose a few games and end up being the fourth seed in the East.

You know, the same East that they’re currently leading by eight points in the regular season. A regular season that we’ve been told is now over, meaning the Bruins officially finished on top.

A Presidents’ Trophy winner that doesn’t even have home-ice advantage after the first round of the playoffs. That wouldn’t be possible in a pre-pandemic world. It almost certainly shouldn’t be possible today. But it is, which means it has to happen.

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Grab Bag: Fixing the lottery, let’s experiment on bad teams and happier times for Minnesota fans

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Should there be a limit on teams winning the lottery?
- A brilliant idea for meaningless late-season games we can steal from the 1930s
- An obscure player who may have invented the unsustainable shooting percentage
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a YouTube look back at the Minnesota Fighting Saints, one of the weirdest teams of the early WHA days

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Five forgotten games that ended up changing the draft lottery results

Saturday night's lottery certainly shook up the draft order, with four of the league's worst teams suffering the dreaded three-spot drop while the Devils, Flyers and Stars all moved up.

We probably should have seen at least part of that coming. Earlier in the week, I predicted that the Devils would win because they had the lottery's most unbeatable good luck charm: Taylor Hall. He was drafted with a lottery-winning choice, he stuck around Edmonton for multiple lottery wins, he was eventually traded for another player taken with a lottery-winning choice, and now he's willed his team to yet another one. By the time it was made official, even Hall himself was having some fun with it.

Officially adding "NHL lottery ball specialist" to my hockey resume.

— Taylor Hall (@hallsy09) April 30, 2017

But were Saturday night's results really inevitable? Maybe not. The beauty of the NHL system is that once you know which spots in the standings held ended up holding the winning combos, you can go back and play "what if?" with certain games during the season. That's how you get Patrik Stefan's empty net miss costing the Oilers the Patrick Kane pick, or how a comical Ryan Getzlaf giveaway ends up costing the Coyotes the services of Patrik Laine.

Now that we know which spots in this year's standings turned out to be the lucky ones – 27^th, 19^th and 24^th if you're keeping track – let's take another run at some alternate history with five games that may have single-handedly changed the lottery results. Warning: This can get painful for certain teams. You've been warned, Canucks fans.

March 19, 2017 – Hurricanes at Flyers

The Flyers and Hurricanes both went into this late-season matchup desperately needing a win. Tied at 72 points, both teams were seven back of the Maple Leafs for the final playoff spot and needed to all but run the table to have a shot at the postseason.

It turned out to be a good game, with the Flyers taking a 2-0 lead early in the second before the Hurricanes pushed back to tie it. It stayed that way until a Jordan Staal goal midway through the third gave Carolina a 3-2 lead, and a shot a crucial road win.

But with the goalie pulled in the final minute, the Flyers tied it up on a fluke. Travis Konecny's attempt at a centering pass got caught in the feet of Hurricanes' defenseman Brett Pesce, who accidentally kicked it into this own net. That sent the game to overtime, where Brayden Schenn won it for Philadelphia less than 40 seconds in.

At the time, the loss seemed like one more blow to the Hurricanes fading playoff hopes. But it ended up being something more. If Carolina avoids Pesce's accidental own goal and holds on for a regulation win, they finish the year with 88 points, passing the Flyers for 19^th spot. That would have made it a Hurricanes logo that Bill Daly flipped over for the second overall pick, the first lottery win in Carolina franchise history.

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