Draft Lottery – Win or Lose

While the Canucks did their best to move up thereby improving the overall odds of possibly winning the 2017 NHL Draft Lottery, it wasn’t meant to be.

If you are unsure how the draft lottery works each team is assigned a specific amount of four-number combinations.

The lottery machine then spits out four numbers that are matched with the random combinations to determine which teams will pick first.

This same process is repeated to see who picks second and third, but this year the winning combination proved to be 1, 5, 6 and 12.

The Canucks and the Wings had the first three but that wasn’t enough to get them close, but it’s interesting to note that the Wings were one number off at getting the second overall pick.

Moving up in the lottery would have been huge for the Canucks given the recent hiring of Travis Green and technically the second-most statistically outcome would have had them with a second round selection.

Vancouver enters the NHL Draft June 23rd having the fifth (5th) overall pick for the second straight year and given the fact it’s better than 20th the player selected simply won’t be  a player to turn the team around – at the present time.

Reflecting back to the 2014 draft where we saw a number of what became impact players for them to choose this draft should be possibly a two-player race between Nico Hischier and Nolan Patrick.

One can only hope that the Canucks have learned from the 2014 draft when they took local product Jake Virtanen and passed on Toronto’s William Nylander and Nikolaj Ehlers of the Jets.

Ehlers was selected in the first round 9th overall and signed for $925,000 and becomes a RFA in 2018 while Nylander was selected 8th overall also in the first round and also makes $925,000 and is set become an RFI also in 2018.

Chances are they will never reach the RFA stage, nor should they, but Virtanen on the other hand was sent down to play in Utica for the Comets for the remainder of the season and who knows what next season holds for him or the Canucks?

It will be interesting to see what the upcoming draft holds and what players will be open for Vegas given the expansion in the next while.

The past while there has been pressure on Benning as well as Linden from the general public as they are simply pondering what this duo has in store for the struggling team.

Are they on a rebuild, will they admit it or will they stay the course and continue to have the fans pondering what the future holds for the local squad.

It seemed that Benning hands were tied as he was unable to get any possible assets for Radim Vrbata or BC product Dan Hamhuis, with them stepping away from the organization.

Let’s not forget the Erik Gudbranson trade that quickly followed that saw the Canucks being stuck in the middle and no one seemed to be interested in their starting “tender” Ryan Miller.

While most thought they were on a rebuild the Canucks still failed to mention that phrase and did manage to pull out a move that seemed significant to the organization.

Fan favourite Alex Burrows was replaced by Jonathan Dahlen and Jannik Hansen was send packing for Nikolay Goldobin plus a conditional 4th round draft pick.  

This move seemed to be the beginning of the end for the long term players and many are pondering what will happen to the “Twins” or will they be the next to move?

With Burrows and Hansen moved we notice that only four players are remaining from the 2011 Western Conference Champion team – Daniel and Henrik Sedin, Alex Edler, and Chris Tanev.

Many are calling the lottery a joke, but currently it’s what the NHL has in place, but I for one can’t wait to see who ends up in Vegas.