Wow, I hope all of this is just speculation or a misunderstanding because having a draft lottery where every team has an equal chance of picking first is ridiculous. How could the NHL possibly justify giving teams like New Jersey, Detroit, Colorado, Dallas, or Tampa Bay the first pick when each team has won a Cup during the last decade at least once?
And I wish people would stop using the size of a team's roster as an indicator of how much they "deserve" the first pick. I remember reading about some of the Bruins management saying that they deserved a better shot at the first pick because they have so few players under contract for next year. If a team only has six or seven players under contract for next season, then that's their problem, not the NHL's. The purpose of drafting in a particular order is to give the weakest teams the highest picks, not the smallest teams.
Using the previous season's draft order, or better yet the cumulative standings over the last three years is the best way to do it. The records of the NHL's thirty teams over the past three years are better indicators of where they are likely to finish next season than some completely random lottery, and this includes the fact that many teams will have very different rosters with all the player movement that is expected to occur once the new CBA is in place. If they're not going to do it this way, they might as well not have a draft and just wait until a full season has been played to determine the order.