How a mystery team won the NHL Draft Lottery.

This will no doubt go down as the most interesting draft lottery in the history of the National Hockey League and, as someone with no skin in the game, I have to admit the fact things turned out this way is going to make things very exciting. 

As most of you reading this will already know the NHL held its annual draft lottery last night to determine who would receive the very top pick in the NHL Entry Draft. Each year the league goes through a weighted lottery process to determine who, out of all the teams that missed the playoffs, will draft first at the upcoming NHL draft, with the worst teams in the league receiving the best odds. This year however things were a little more complicated given the fact that we have 8 extra teams participating in a "play in" round prior to the official 16 team playoff format. This meant that 8 teams would ostensibly be eliminated prior to entering the official 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs and furthermore it means that 8 of those teams also deserved a spot in the draft lottery.

In order to give those 8 as of yet unidentified teams a shot at the lottery the NHL introduced a scenario in which a mystery team, labeled "Team E" for the purpose of the draw. There was only one possible combination of balls in the lottery that could have produced a winning result for Team E, but in a shocking and pleasantly surprising turn of events that combination is exactly the one the lottery hit on last night. Sportsnet insider Chris Johnston broke down just how unlikely this scenario was, making it all that more incredible.

From Johnston:

After balls 9-10-2 were drawn for the No. 1 overall pick in tonight's NHL draft lottery, the Senators owned the most potential winning combinations on the last ball: OTT (x4), DET (x2), ANA (x1), NJ (x1), BUF (x1), Team A (x1), Team E (x1).

This now means that we will be seeing one of the play in teams selecting first overall at the upcoming NHL draft, although at the time of this writing we still have no idea who that will be. Of course it will have to be one of the team's eliminated during the play in round, this lottery was designed for the express purpose of preventing a team from winning the lottery and then making a deep playoff run, but only time will tell which team that will be. 

According to Sportsnet NHL insider Elliotte Friedman should the NHL be forced to cancel its planned return to play for any reason, the 8 play in teams would all have a one in eight shot at receiving the top pick