The NHL marketing machine has decided to change the name of the NHL Draft Lottery to the NHL Draft Drawing, which despite the alliteration, just sounds wrong. It's like believing in the Gambler's Fallacy, which would tell us that the Oilers come in with a 23.2% chance of winning the first overall pick since they won last year and those would be the odds of making your 48.2% shot twice in a row. It's just plain wrong. Real draft lottery odds after the jump.
Update: The New Jersey Devils win the lottery and move from 8th to 4th and the Edmonton Oilers retain the first overall pick. Hooray for being terrible!
The Oilers, of course, really do have a 48.2% chance of getting the first overall pick based on their own chances of winning (25.0%) as well as the combined chances of teams 6-14 winning (23.2%), since no team can move up more than four slots. For all you visual people, here's a chart:
Boston's pick, of course, once belonged to Toronto (you may have heard that Phil Kessel was traded to the Leafs). The Blues, meanwhile, only keep their pick if they win the draft lottery and move up to number seven. One of the conditions of the deal that brought Chris Stewart and Kevin Shattenkirk to Missouri was that Colorado would get the Blues' first-round pick if it fell outside the top ten. The Blues' are set to pick 11th. Of course, if the Avalanche get that pick, their second rounder goes to St. Louis, which means they'd select 2nd, 11th, and then not again until the fourth round. Anyway, the draft is set for 6:00 p.m. MDT on TSN, and I'll be hoping for the Oilers to win so that I can be indignant when the team takes Ryan Nugent-Hopkins first overall.