Alex Rickman
May 5th, 2023
With the draft lottery under a week away, there has been a lot of talk around the NHL about how the ping pong balls may fall on May 8th. While Vancouver only has the 11th-best odds of landing the top pick after a solid second half under Rick Tocchet, the thought of even the slightest chance of Connor Bedard joining his hometown team has some Vancouverites hoping that the hockey gods may decide to throw us a bone on the day of the lottery. Today, let’s take a look back on the Canucks history in draft lotteries to see what we can expect to see next Monday, and if the Canucks have any hope of landing the best prospect to hit the NHL draft since Connor McDavid or Auston Matthews.
Even from the first year of the Canucks existence in the NHL, the draft lottery has not been especially kind to them. In 1970, the first overall pick was decided by spinning a wheel, with the Canucks and fellow expansion team Buffalo Sabres each having a 50% chance of landing the top spot. Many consider this spin to be the exact moment Canuck Luck was born, with Buffalo winning the draft lottery and taking future Hall of Famer Gilbert Perreault with their first-ever draft pick. Vancouver settled for defenceman Dale Tallon with the second pick, and while Tallon would become a solid NHL player, it’s hard not to imagine how a star player like Perreault may have changed the Canucks fortunes during their early days in the NHL. From this moment, something of a curse seems to have struck the Canucks in lotteries, with Vancouver never having managed to land a first-overall pick in over 50 years of existence.
While in some cases these other picks have landed Vancouver elite talents, such as Trevor Linden in 1988, Elias Pettersson in 2017, and the third overall pick in 1999 used to take Henrik Sedin, not all of these picks have worked out so well for Vancouver. Poor lottery luck combined with the generally poor drafting of the Jim Benning regime in Vancouver led to players like Jake Virtanen and Olli Juolevi ending up Canucks in draft years that featured players like Aaron Ekblad, Leon Draisaitl, and Auston Matthews going in the top 3. While the lottery isn’t fully to blame for these poor selections, as very talented players also went not long after these picks, the Canucks organization would be in a very different position had they been able to get one of these players instead of Virtanen or Juolevi. While in some cases the Canucks have managed to capitalize on these poor selections, such as Alek Stojanov, who would later be traded to Pittsburg for Markus Naslund, it’s clear to see that the draft lottery just hasn’t been kind to the people of Vancouver.
So, with all of the Canucks historical draft struggles, is there any reason for Canucks fans to get their hopes up about the possibility of landing Connor Bedard or Adam Fantilli this year? Realistically, it’s hard to see a way that the Canucks can land one of this draft's golden geese. Having only a 6.2 percent chance of landing either of the top picks, it’s incredibly difficult to imagine the Canucks picking anywhere in the top 10 this year. However, not all hope is lost, as teams with lower odds than the Canucks have managed to jump up the draft order before. In 2017, the Philadelphia Flyers managed to land the second overall pick with the thirteenth best odds, where they selected Nolan Patrick. Additionally, the New York Rangers got the first overall pick from fourteenth in the 2020 draft, although the lottery was different this year due to the bubble playoffs caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. So, while the odds may be against the Canucks, there is still some hope that we could perhaps defy the odds and land a high draft pick. However, it’s important to remember that even if we don’t, with the quality of this year's draft class, there is no excuse for the Canucks not to walk away with a quality player in the first round.
In reality, we won’t know for sure where the Canucks will be picking until Monday after the lottery has finished, but it’s interesting to speculate and try to guess what could happen. All we can do now is hope that the hockey gods decide to bless the Canucks with some good fortune, either with a lottery win or by finding a future star with a pick just outside the top 10.