NHL Draft Lottery Odds 2026: The Tank Race Is Getting Ugly

Twenty-five and a half percent. That’s what standing dead last in the NHL all season buys you — a one-in-four shot at Gavin McKenna. The Vancouver Canucks are sitting on that number right now, and they earned every bit of it the hard way.

The tank race is real, it’s messy, and it’s about to get decided in the final weeks of the 2025–26 regular season. Let me walk you through who’s where, what the odds actually mean, and why this lottery is one of the most consequential in years.

Where the Tank Race Stands

The Canucks have been the worst team in hockey all season and it isn’t particularly close. At 21-40-8 for 50 points, they’re allowing 3.70 goals per game, which ranks last in the league. Trading Quinn Hughes to Minnesota was the moment everything came undone — they went from a team chasing a playoff spot to an organization in full rebuild mode within a single off-season transaction.

Behind them, the lottery picture gets genuinely interesting. The St. Louis Blues are currently sitting at approximately 13.6% odds for first overall. The New York Rangers are close behind at 11.6%, followed by the Calgary Flames at 9.5% and the Winnipeg Jets at 8.5%. Those five franchises — Vancouver, St. Louis, New York, Calgary, Winnipeg — are the core of the 2026 tank conversation.

The Jets’ collapse deserves its own article, but the short version is this: a team that won the Presidents’ Trophy last season has been one of the biggest disasters in the league this year. That kind of fall from grace is historically rare. It’s also why Jets fans are now rooting for losses in late March, which is a particular kind of hell.

The Rangers are in an interesting spot. They’ve been scoring favorable scoreboard-watching results lately, with Chicago and Calgary wins giving New York additional cushion in their positioning. Under the current lottery format, the No. 2 team is guaranteed a pick no lower than fourth overall — so even if the Rangers don’t win the lottery, they land in the top four in one of the deepest drafts in years.

What the Odds Actually Mean

Here’s what gets lost in tank race coverage: even the team in last place has less than a one-in-five chance of winning the first pick. The lottery is weighted, not guaranteed.

The Canucks’ 25.5% at first overall also comes with a 55.7% probability of sliding to third. Think about that. The most likely single outcome for the worst team in hockey is that they pick third, not first. If that sounds brutal, that’s because it is — and it’s by design. The NHL built this system to limit tanking incentives.

The draft lottery is scheduled for May 5th, according to Daily Faceoff, with the draft itself set for June 26–27 in Buffalo at KeyBank Center.

One rule that doesn’t get enough attention: teams can only win the lottery twice in a five-year span. That restriction matters for some of the franchises in this race. And only the bottom 11 teams in the standings are eligible for the first pick at all — if you finish 12th from the bottom, you’re locked out of the No. 1 conversation entirely.

The 2020 lottery is the cautionary tale every fan of a bottom-dwelling team clings to. The New York Rangers won that lottery with the 14th-best odds and walked away with Alexis Lafrenière. More recently, the New York Islanders pulled it off last season with 10th-best odds — just 3.5% — and selected defenseman Matthew Schaefer. Lottery magic happens. It also happens to other people’s teams more often than not.

The Prize: Gavin McKenna

Let’s be clear about what everyone is actually tanking for. McKenna is a generational talent. He played in the WHL with the Medicine Hat Tigers last season and put up 129 points (41 goals, 88 assists) in 56 games, finishing second in the entire league in scoring. He followed that up with a 45-game point streak that tied Brad Richards for the second-longest single-season streak in CHL history since 2000.

This season at Penn State in the NCAA, he’s been doing what top prospects do — producing at a rate that has him among the youngest scorers in the league. At the 2026 World Juniors in December, he finished second in tournament scoring with 14 points in seven games and helped Canada to a bronze medal.

Central Scouting associate director David Gregory put it simply: “When you think of the key skills you have to have in the NHL — you have to be smart, you have to be able to skate and you have to be able to compete. Those three important skills are maybe his three best skills.” That’s not the kind of scouting language you use for a good prospect. That’s what you say about a franchise cornerstone.

The class doesn’t end with McKenna. Forwards Ivar Stenberg and Tynan Lawrence have made legitimate cases for top-five consideration, and defensemen Keaton Verhoeff, Alberts Smits, and Chase Reid add depth that makes third overall — or even fifth — a meaningful return. This isn’t a year where falling out of the top pick is catastrophic. It’s still a strong draft top to bottom.

Who Has the Most to Gain

The Canucks are playing for something real here. After watching Hughes leave, after a season of historic defensive futility, landing McKenna first overall would be a franchise-altering moment. It would give their rebuild a clear center of gravity and give their fanbase something to believe in. They’re the right team in the right spot at the right time — if the lottery balls fall their way.

The Rangers are the most strategically interesting case. They traded Artemi Panarin this past season, signaling a genuine shift in direction. A top-two pick virtually guarantees them a franchise player. The question isn’t whether they get a good prospect — it’s whether they get McKenna or someone else. At 11.6% to win outright and guaranteed no worse than fourth, their floor is remarkably high.

The Flames and Jets are in a more uncomfortable zone. Both franchises have been disappointing this season for different reasons, and neither set out to be here. A high lottery pick softens the blow of a lost season, but it doesn’t erase the organizational questions that led to these records.

The Bottom Line

The 2026 NHL Draft Lottery is shaping up to be one of the more watched spring events in recent memory. McKenna’s talent level, the depth of the class, and the storylines involved — Vancouver’s rebuild, New York’s pivot, Winnipeg’s collapse — make this feel genuinely consequential beyond just the first pick.

The lottery spins on May 5th. Every team in the bottom 11 has a realistic path to something valuable. The math favors Vancouver for first overall, but as this league has shown repeatedly, the math is just a starting point.

Who do you want to see win the lottery? And do you think the Canucks deserve McKenna after the year they’ve had, or should another team get the lucky bounce? Drop your take on social media — I want to hear who you’re rooting for on May 5th.