Detroit Red Wings: Draft lottery announced for early April
By Tyler Kotila
The Detroit Red Wings are looking to come away with the first overall pick in the 2020 NHL Entry Draft, and the day we all find out has finally been announced.
With fourteen games left in the 2019-20 regular season, the Detroit Red Wings have locked up the best odds for the first overall pick in the 2020 NHL Entry Draft. Currently, the Red Wings are 16-48-5 through sixty-nine games, registering only thirty-seven total points on the season.
As they limp across the finish line, the fanbase can finally have something to look forward to, the draft lottery announcement. On Thursday, April 9th, the league will run the drawing to determine the draft order for picks one through fifteen.
The Red Wings will have an 18.5% chance of earning the first overall pick and a 49.4% chance of receiving a top-three draft choice. The lowest the Red Wings can fall to is the fourth overall pick, if the lottery balls are unkind to the organization.
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Last year, the Red Wings would ultimately fall to sixth overall, where they would still go out and draft Moritz Seider. Although Seider has been nothing short of impressive with the Red Wings organization since coming in, having Jack Hughes or Kaapo Kakko would have been pretty fantastic.
The Red Wings are in a rebuild, and the consistent early draft picks will only help boost this process. If fans are truly going to trust the “Yzer-plan,” then whoever the Red Wings end up with early in the 2020 draft will be part of the solution.
With last year’s draft lottery being quite angering, the expectations for this year cannot be very high after the Red Wings would fall to sixth last year. This prompted me to start looking into the simulators and try to determine if the Red Wings will get the first overall pick.
Using the simulator provided by Tankathon dot com, I ran the simulation 100 times to see the outcomes and try to get a grip on what to be prepared for going into the draft lottery.
The results are as follows:
- First Overall Pick: 17
- Second Overall Pick: 17
- Third Overall Pick: 11
- Fourth Overall Pick: 55
After going through the 100 simulations, it was not much different from the percentages discussed above. The glaringly obvious occurrence was the Red Wings falling to the fourth overall pick, which is what all fans are rooting against as the lottery nears.
The Red Wings are historically bad this season, and at this point, getting anything lower than the first overall pick is considered a failure. But with the hefty talent pool available, landing any of the top three picks will be a boost for the Red Wings organization.
If the Red Wings can have a shot at Alexis Lafranière, who is this year’s version of Nico Hischier, Hughes, or Connor McDavid, he is the best player in the upcoming draft. Hopefully, the Red Wings can snag him with the first overall pick.
Besides Lafranière, the forward Quinton Byfield and defenseman Jamie Drysdale are both having incredible seasons. Both Byfield and Drysdale are also easily considerable with the Red Wings’ first pick. If the Red Wings do fall to fourth, and these three go one, two, and three, Marco Rossi is a reliable fourth option for the Red Wings.
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For now, fans can only hope and await the results of the NHL draft lottery on April 9th, when the Red Wings fans can rejoice or be disappointed by the fate of some lottery balls.