Winning the lottery would spell the end of the rebuild for the Canadiens

The NHL lottery isn’t always the jackpot – but tonight, everyone’s lining up in convenience stores to buy a Power Ball ticket. And if you win, don’t complain that you’ll have to pay taxes on your winnings.

Connor Bedard is a ten-figure jackpot for a franchise.

The tax, in this case, is as follows. The team that wins the Connor Bedard lottery will most likely have to change all its short-term plans. This is a good one.

Drafting Adam Fantilli is fun, but it doesn’t change a team overnight. More than likely, Connor Bedard will have an 80-100 point season in his first campaign, and his club will be fighting for a playoff spot. The comparison is impossible with Connor McDavid, since he missed the second half of the season, but the Oilers racked up 47 wins in his second season in the Bettman circuit.

In other words, if the Canadiens win the Connor Bedard lottery tonight, the end of the rebuild will have come 526 days after Jeff Gorton was hired.

What would that mean next year? The Habs could already be trying to acquire impact players to maximize Connor Bedard’s three-year entry-level contract, and set their sights on the Stanley Cup very soon. We repeat: 1 year, 5 months and 10 days after Marc Bergevin’s dismissal.

We’re dreaming/speculating. But it’s possible that the difficult 2023-2024 season we’re imagining today will be completely different tomorrow morning, and that the long rebuild to come won’t even last two calendar years,

And it’s much the same for the eleven teams who can hope to win the first pick tonight.

It also means that if the CH lose the lottery and draft second, the rebuild will continue and the team could potentially find itself in a very good position for a third consecutive lottery in 2024.

The Canadiens have an 8.5% chance of winning it. That’s a lot, but not that much. That’s still 91.5% of NOT drafting first. In fact, Montreal has a much better chance of moving down one spot (44%) than up one spot or more (17.4%).

Only a few hours to go before we find out the fate of eleven franchises…

En Rafale

– 8 years ago.

– New nickname: The Scoreless Four. Wow.

– We can keep that in mind.