Like Rzombo alluded to, and others I have seen, this lottery news isn’t exactly unexpected at all. The one bit of hope I believed that we were trying to keep a strangle hold on was the June draft concept, and that’s likely short sighted on our end. Yzerman’s relative aggression towards not changing the format early on is probably an indicator of how he views this draft. He likely values the salary, roster, and asset flexibility, and further it might indicate that weighing the odds and assessing his short list of players, he may have players tightly bunched in a top 3-4 that he’s confident in.
I think the part that kills me now is the added suspense that this presents. I’m a big fan of a lot of these kids this year; more so than I recall being last year. Obviously you have the big 1-2 up top that many share, but at 3 or 4 I could honestly see 5 or 6 names that I could get excited about pretty much immediately. So acknowledging how many more potential scenarios exist now that we have a strong chance at picking 3 or 4, and the fact that they basically reassigned the lottery format that could have been rolled out as early as tomorrow, but we have to wait a month just to get some added clarity...not really helping the anticipation.