Continue Tank Talk here. To kick it off, I'm pasting in the post by @cheesehead9099 that I think should be a nice reminder to us here:
Being the absolute worst team in the league has won the lotto twice, but we also see a lot of teams jumping draft spots. And I don't think there is a chance of anyone catching Ottawa in the race to awful this year.
Lottery results w/ team's chance of winning that pick and their reverse seeding:
2016
1st: Leafs, 20% (last)
2nd: Winnipeg, 7.8% (6th last)
3rd: Columbus, 9.8% (4th last)
2017
1st: New Jersey - 8.5% (5th last)
2nd: Philadelphia - 2.5% (13th last)
3rd: Dallas - 6.4% (8th last)
2018
1st: Buffalo, 18% (last)
2nd: Carolina, 3.3% (11th last)
3rd: Montreal, 9.7% (4th last).
Since the new lottery system came into action, the top 3 teams have never really won the top picks. The last team has won the first pick a couple of times but it's mostly other teams jumping. This is an artifact of how close the odds actually are for all these teams - all within a few percentage points of each other. People here really need to realise that while it sucks that our odds are going down a bit ,the difference isn't nearly as big as you all think. Absolute worst case, 3 teams that are all below us win and we end with the 8th overall pick. Unlikely but that's the only case in whcih we get sorta screwed, cause picks 3-7 are all fantastic, as I've discussed on here before.
Being the absolute worst team in the league has won the lotto twice, but we also see a lot of teams jumping draft spots. And I don't think there is a chance of anyone catching Ottawa in the race to awful this year.