Toronto Maple Leafs (and Their Fans) Don’t Care About the Top Pick

The Toronto Maple Leafs don’t care about the top pick in the upcoming draft.

Last week, the Toronto Maple Leafs and 15 other place-holder teams potentially won the NHL’s Draft Lottery.

In what can only be seen as an embarrassing and idiotic set-up, the NHL for some reason allowed teams that are going to make the playoffs a chance to win the top pick in the draft.

Teams like New York and Montreal probably had no chance to make the playoffs under regular circumstances, so the NHL gave them a 2.5% chance to win the lottery.

Toronto Maple Leafs and the Top Pick

The unintended consequence of this is that teams with legitimate contender status now have a shot  at the top pick.   Teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs, Edmonton Oilers, Carolina Hurricanes and Pittsburgh Penguins.

In the NHL, luck is a bigger factor than roster strength in the standings until over 70 games have been played.  Most NHL teams played 70 games or less this year, meaning that the final standings are even more random than usual.

In a salary cap league with near full parity, an unlucky month can drastically alter the final standings.

The Leafs are well behind the Bruins and Lightning in the standings, but if you look at the more predictive team stats, you will see that Toronto and Carolina have similar (and often better) team stats than Boston and Tampa.

So two teams that had kind of unlucky regular seasons could easily end up with the top pick if they run into a hot goalie during a five game series later this summer.

All eight teams who are eliminated in the play-in will have an equal 12.5% chance to win the top pick.  Since the Leafs are heavy favorites over Columbus, their current odds are about 1 in 20, or 5%.

Even though Alexis Lafreniere would be an absolutely crazy addition to the Leafs, I don’t think anyone should be cheering for the Leafs to lose to Columbus.

The fact is that if the Leafs get even half-decent goaltending, they could slice through playoffs with relative ease.

No team can match their centre depth, and no team can move the puck up the ice from the back-end as well as they can.  The Leafs were a good year from Freddie Andersen away from being the league’s best team this year, and if Andersen gets hot (which is a way higher than 1 in 20 chance) the Leafs can easily win the Stanley Cup.

Lafreniere-Matthews-Marner is something even the most hard-hearted Leafs fan would get excited over, but it’d still be better to win a playoff series or two, let alone the Stanley Cup.