How Lucky Are The Sens? Draft Lottery Tonight
By Editorial Staff
Tonight will mark the first stage of your Ottawa Senators rebuild. The 2011 Entry Draft Lottery will be held tonight on TSN at 8pm to determine the order of this year’s draft. Currently, Ottawa holds down the fifth spot as they finished 26th in the league. Ahead of them (or below them, how ever you want to look at it) are the New York Islanders, the Florida Panthers, the Colorado Avalanche and the Edmonton Oilers.
For Ottawa, they only have three options in the lottery. One – they could stay where they currently are and end up with the fifth pick overall (mostly likely scenario). Two – they could win the lottery and draft first overall (unlikely, but maybe Karma will reward Ottawa). Three – another team out of the top/bottom five could win the lottery and push Ottawa into sixth overall (in this happens, Ottawa can only fall one draft position at most). Even though most times the worst team in the NHL obtains the first overall pick, there have been times when the fifth overall team got lucky (Chicago did it in 2007 when they moved from fifth to first and selected Patrick Kane first overall).
With no clear cut number one prospect in this year’s draft, Ottawa has the opportunity to draft a very good prospect no matter what position they’re at. Here’s a look at the odds of which team will win the draft lottery courtesy of NHL.com:
30th place team – 25.0% (EDM)
29th place team – 18.8% (COL)
28th place team – 14.2% (FLA)
27th place team – 10.7% (NYI)
26th place team – 8.1% (OTT)
25th place team – 6.2% (ATL)
24th place team – 4.7% (CBJ)
23rd place team – 3.6% (NJD)
22nd place team – 2.7% (TOR)
21st place team – 2.1% (MIN)
20th place team – 1.5% (STL)
19th place team – 1.1% (CAR)
18th place team – 0.8% (CGY)
17th place team – 0.5% (DAL)
Here’s a look at the top 10 ranked North American skaters for this year’s draft:
Gabriel Landeskog (LW)
Dougie Hamilton (D)
Nathan Beaulieu (D)
Sean Couturier (C)
Sven Baertschi (LW)
Ryan Strome (C)
Ryan Murphy (D)
And here is the top 5 ranked European skaters for this year’s draft:
Adam Larsson (D)
Mika Zibanejad (C)
Jonas Brodin (D)
Joel Armia (RW)
Dmitri Jaskin (RW)
Tonight will be the first major step in Ottawa’s rebuild. We’ll find out tonight where Ottawa will draft and go from there. ‘Til next time, GO SENS GO!!!
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