VANCOUVER -- Shaken down mercilessly by the NHL Draft Lottery over the last five years, the Vancouver Canucks were finally allowed Wednesday to keep their lunch money.
Seeded ninth in this year’s lottery, the Canucks will pick ninth in the first round of the entry draft on July 23.
In Vancouver, not losing feels like winning.
Actually, winning the draft lottery? On the West Coast, that’s like dreaming of world peace or global cooling or free sushi.
“Well, the good news is we didn't drop,” Benning told Sportsnet after Wednesday’s televised lottery. “I think that's a positive.
“It would have been nice to win. Even to go to No. 2, it would have been nice. But with our luck with the lottery, I'm not surprised.”
The lottery, finally being slightly reformed after it became a fan spectacle to generate excitement instead of an anti-tank mechanism for teams that need the most help at the draft, hammered the Canucks for four straight years before Benning ended his losing streak in 2020 by trading away his first-round pick for J.T. Miller.
The Canucks certainly do not want a do-over on that transaction, nor would they give up most of the top players they have selected: Elias Pettersson, fifth in 2017; Quinn Hughes, seventh in 2018; Vasily Podkolzin, 10th in 2019.
But in a four-year period starting in 2016, which coincided with the rebuild orchestrated by Benning and former Canucks president Trevor Linden, the NHL Draft Lottery pushed Vancouver back seven places in the draft order. Those first two years, the Canucks were shoved down to fifth from third, and fifth from second.
The last-place Buffalo Sabres won this year’s first-overall pick on Wednesday despite having only a 16.6 per cent chance of doing so. The expansion Seattle Kraken won the second pick, moving up a single spot. The Anaheim Ducks were the only losers, nudged to third from second in the draft order.
The NHL drew only two lottery winners this season, down from three in previous years, and also capped advancement to no more than 10 places.
No. 9 was an important threshold for the Canucks because Benning said his organization’s top-tier of draft prospects includes nine players, so it was important that Vancouver didn’t move backwards by having a team behind them win one of Wednesday’s draws.
“We’ve got nine guys that we really like,” Benning said. “Some teams might pick a guy that’s lower on our list, but at least we know we’re going to get one of the nine guys we really like.
“It was a COVID year but I feel strongly that through all the different avenues that we have to know the players, I feel like we know the players. You've got to figure out the guys you really want and maybe have some luck that maybe the guy you really want falls to you. I'm just happy we didn't fall any further down.
“We’re going to add another really good player to our group of young players.”
At the end of a disastrous season for them, the Canucks hurt their draft order by going 2-1-1 in their final four games. But there is some positive karma for the organization at No. 9.
Former general manager Mike Gillis slightly burnished his appalling draft record by selecting captain Bo Horvat ninth-overall in 2013 after acquiring the pick from the New Jersey Devils in a blockbuster trade for goalie Cory Schneider.
The previous time the Canucks drafted ninth, back in 1983, general manager Harry Neale chose hometown power forward Cam Neely. But regrettably – and typical of a large swath of team history -- Neal’s successor, Jack Gordon, traded the eventual Hall-of-Famer and a first-round pick to the Boston Bruins for Barry Pederson.
With this season’s regression, there is plenty to criticize about Benning amid the tedious pace of the Canucks’ construction. But the drafting and player development during his seven-year tenure is easily the best of any managerial era in franchise history.
Given the punitiveness of recent draft lotteries and earlier history when there were years the Canucks burned through entire drafts without harvesting a single NHL player, Benning’s reaction on Wednesday felt like a mantra: “The good news is we didn't drop.”
