You don’t really lose a lottery. It’s not a competitive enterprise; no one has any control over the outcome. Either your number comes up and you win it, or it doesn’t and you don’t.
On Saturday night, the Vancouver Canucks didn’t win the NHL draft lottery for the first overall pick. They didn’t win the lottery for the second overall pick either, or the third. The Canucks ended up with the fifth overall pick, which was always their most likely draft slot based on their finish.
For even the league’s most tortured fan base — and Canucks fans can make a compelling case — falling two slots down the draft order is tough to swallow.
Pick No. 5 is a decent consolation prize though. When the Canucks take the stage in Buffalo on June 24 they’ll still enjoy pretty good odds of landing an impactful NHL asset.
The 2016 NHL draft class is generally thought to be strong. It’s highlighted by three big forwards – Auston Matthews, Patrik Laine, Jesse Puljujärvi – all of whom played in Europe this past season. They were the big prizes on lottery night, and there’s little doubt about the order in which those players will be selected.
Once the ‘big three’ are off the board, all bets are off. And the team picking one spot ahead of the Canucks, the Edmonton Oilers, are shaping up to be the league’s most fascinating draft day wildcard.
Edmonton has significant needs and a mandate to improve quickly. It wouldn’t be surprising for the Oilers to do literally anything at all with the fourth overall selection – trade it, select a defenceman, take a forward, go off the board a bit – except for trade up. No team with a top-three pick is parting with it this year.
Regardless of how Edmonton uses its pick, when the dust settles and the Canucks are on the clock they’ll have some good options.
Pierre-Luc Dubois, for example, has seen his stock skyrocket in recent months. He’s a massive forward who played centre and wing in the QMJHL this season, scoring at a stupendous pace for a 17-year-old. Canucks general manager Jim Benning made a point of seeing some of Dubois’ playoff games before taking in the U18s in Grand Forks last month, and he came away impressed.
There’s also Matthew Tkachuk, the scion of an elite power forward, who spent his first-time draft-eligible season setting the Ontario Hockey League on fire. Tkachuk surely benefited from riding shotgun with Toronto Maple Leafs prospect Mitch Marner in London, but if you put his stat line up against the likes of Taylor Hall, Tyler Seguin and Steven Stamkos from their respective final OHL campaigns, you won’t see much daylight.
If there were any remaining doubters pointing to Tkachuk’s ‘Sam Gagner potential’ at the conclusion of the OHL’s regular season, Tkachuk has mostly shut them up in the playoffs. He has scored better than a goal per game for the past six weeks.
Upgrading the quality and depth of the back-end prospect pool is also a significant priority for the Canucks. London Knights defenceman Olli Juolevi is thought to be the apple of Vancouver’s eye, but Jake Bean, Jakob Chychrun, Charles McAvoy and Mikhail Sergachev are all high-end prospects. It’s a draft class deep on gifted, young defencemen.
In the aftermath of the lottery balls’ unfriendly bounces on Saturday night, Canucks president Trevor Linden insisted that he’s still confident his club can find a foundational piece at the 2016 NHL Draft. That isn’t just bluster.
“The top three guys will probably get you the instant (gratification) this fall,” Linden told a Vancouver radio station following the lottery. “But we’re at five and we’re going to get a really good player. We might have to wait a year or two, but nonetheless, it’s a marathon and not a sprint…”
Patience, like luck, is something that’s often been in short supply in the Vancouver hockey market. It’s something the organization will require – and have to earn – from its fans going forward, and not just in the context of the development time required by the club’s prospects.
If one looks over the composition of this Canucks team, it seems likely that Saturday night’s lottery won’t be the last one the organization will attend over the next several seasons. This is a team facing an uphill climb, caught between the past and the future while dealing with waning interest and a significant talent deficit. It’s a massive job and the shrewdness with which they restock is likely to prove more important over the long haul than the instant gratification of a draft lottery win.
Vancouver’s management team will need to be discerning if they hope to reverse their downward trajectory. This is an organization that simply needs a lot more talent and a lot more youth. At some point, yes, they’ll require a dose of good fortune too.
The Canucks didn’t get their bounce on Saturday night, but drafting fifth overall shouldn’t be seen as a setback to their sometimes-stilted rebuilding project. It’s still just the start.
