How the NHL Draft Lottery Works: Rules, Odds, and Why It Matters in 2026

On May 5, 2025, the New York Islanders walked into the NHL draft lottery with a 3.5% chance of winning and walked out with the first overall pick. The room erupted. Nashville — the team everyone assumed would take home Matthew Schaefer — fell to fifth. Utah jumped the full maximum of 10 spots. It was a perfect illustration of why this event matters and why so many fans still don’t fully understand what they’re watching.

The lottery isn’t just a formality. It’s a system with specific rules, hard caps, and deliberate design choices meant to stop tanking from becoming a full-blown competitive strategy. Understanding it makes you a smarter fan — and right now, with Gavin McKenna waiting at the top of the 2026 draft board, it’s worth knowing exactly how this thing works.

The Ping Pong Ball System

The NHL uses 14 numbered balls in a lottery machine. Four balls are drawn at a time, creating a four-digit combination. Drawing four numbers from 14 produces 1,001 possible combinations — the NHL uses 1,000 of them (combination 11-12-13-14 is permanently designated as a redraw). Those 1,000 combinations are distributed among the 16 non-playoff teams, weighted by how badly they finished.

The team with the worst record in the league receives 185 combinations out of 1,000 — an 18.5% chance at the first pick. That percentage drops steadily for each successively better team, all the way down to the team with the 16th-worst record, who gets a handful of combinations and a slim prayer.

Ernst & Young oversees the entire process to ensure integrity. Since 2025, the drawing is broadcast live on television. Before that, it was held privately and results were announced after the fact — a change long overdue for a league that loves to generate buzz.

Two Drawings, Two Lottery Winners

This is the rule that trips people up most. Since 2021, the lottery doesn’t just determine the first overall pick — it determines the first two lottery winners via separate drawings.

Drawing 1 establishes the 1st overall pick. Only the bottom 11 teams are eligible (teams seeded 12th through 16th cannot win it outright — if they somehow draw the winning combination, the 1st pick defaults to the worst-record team and the drawing is redone). Any team that wins can jump a maximum of 10 spots from their pre-lottery seeding.

Drawing 2 determines the second lottery winner. The same 10-spot maximum applies, recalculated from the reseeded order after Drawing 1.

The practical result: a team seeded 14th can jump to 4th. That’s what Utah did in 2025. A team seeded 10th can jump to 1st. That’s where the Islanders came from. No matter how it shakes out, the team with the worst record is guaranteed no worse than 3rd overall — they can only be bumped twice at most.

The Five-Year Cap on Winning

Teams can only win the lottery twice within any five-year span. This prevents a franchise from building a permanent tank machine and winning the lottery every time they’re bad. It’s an imperfect solution to a real problem, but it’s a constraint worth knowing when you’re tracking a team’s odds.

2026: Who’s in the Race and What’s at Stake

The 2026 draft is held June 26–27 at KeyBank Center in Buffalo, with the lottery drawing expected in May. At the top of every board is Gavin McKenna — a 18-year-old left wing from Whitehorse, Yukon, currently lighting up Penn State’s freshman class with 51 points in 34 NCAA games. NHL Central Scouting, McKeen’s Hockey, and virtually every credible ranker have him #1. His passing is described as historic at the NCAA level; scouts have compared his play-making sense to Mitch Marner. The questions around his physical engagement and off-puck investment are real, but they haven’t moved him off the top spot.

Whoever wins the 2026 lottery is getting a franchise-changing talent.

Right now, the Vancouver Canucks have the worst record in the league by a considerable margin — sitting at approximately 20-37-8, with a home record on pace to be one of the worst in franchise history. They suffered an 11-game losing streak this season. Their odds at the first pick are the best in the field.

The Nashville Predators, Chicago Blackhawks, and Calgary Flames are all fighting near the bottom alongside Vancouver for positioning, but it’s the Vancouver situation that most closely resembles a clear-cut, outright worst-team scenario.

The Maple Leafs Subplot

The most bizarre storyline of the 2026 lottery race involves a team that almost certainly won’t be in it. The Toronto Maple Leafs are on pace to miss the playoffs for the first time since 2016 — and they traded their 2026 first-round pick to the Boston Bruins in the Brandon Carlo deal. The pick is top-5 protected.

What that means: if Toronto ends up in the top 5 via the lottery, they keep their pick. If not, it goes to Boston — a team that could make the playoffs this year. The Bruins could sit comfortably in the postseason picture and still receive a pick in the 8-to-12 range from the lottery. It’s the kind of scenario that makes GMs look reckless in hindsight and makes fans furious in real time.

Toronto currently has roughly a 13% chance of landing a top-2 selection. Every win they stumble into pushes those odds down and makes the gift to Boston worse.

Why the System Works — And Where It Falls Short

The lottery was designed to discourage full-scale tanking by capping how far any team can jump and guaranteeing the worst team can’t fall past third. It works, to a degree. Teams can’t truly guarantee themselves the first pick no matter how catastrophically they perform.

But it doesn’t eliminate the incentive to lose. A team sitting 12th-worst has essentially no shot at the first pick regardless of how many games they throw away. The gradient of odds is steep enough that the bottom three or four teams have meaningfully better chances — enough to make a losing season feel strategically worthwhile for a franchise in full rebuild mode.

The five-year win cap helps, but teams have found workarounds. The real solution involves complex incentive redesigns that the league has been slow to adopt.

For now, this is the system. And in May, when those ping pong balls start dropping, even the teams with the worst odds have a reason to watch. Just ask the 2025 Islanders.

Think your team has a shot at the lottery jackpot this year? Who do you want drafting McKenna — drop your take in the comments or find me on X.