NHL 2008 Entry Draft Lottery Winners and Drafting Order

1. Tampa Bay Lightning
2. Los Angeles Kings
3. Atlanta Thrashers
4. St. Louis Blues
5. New York Islanders
6. Columbus
7. Toronto
8. Phoenix
9. Nashville from Florida
10. Vancouver
11. Chicago
12. Anaheim from Edmonton
13. Buffalo
14. Carolina

Stay tuned for the rest of the draft order for teams 1-14. I will be updating this post with the finalized NHL draft orders as they are announced. You can easily bookmark this page by pressing Ctrl + D on your keyboard.

Updated:  Read about how the NHL Draft Lottery Turned out: 

The NHL entry draft lottery for 2008 will be held this Monday, April 7 at 8 pm eastern on TSN, Versus and the NHL Network. The NHL draft lottery allows the bottom 5 teams a shot at the top overall pick. The consensus number one pick this year is Steven Stamkos. The Stamkos Sweepstakes have fans of losing teams drooling over the possibility of drafting the talented youngster.

The way the NHL 2008 draft lottery will work is it will give the bottom 5 teams (the Kings, Lightning, Thrashers, Blues and Islanders have clinched the bottom 5) a shot at winning the overall #1 pick. However, once the final positions are determined, each team can move up to #1 draft pick, but they cannot move down more 1 overall spot. The NHL draft lottery does protect the team’s positions for their awfulness during the regular season.

Overall, the 14 teams that won’t make the playoffs will be involved in the draft lottery system. As I stated above, only the bottom 5 have a shot at #1. But team from 6-14 have the chance to improve their positions drastically. One of the biggest upward movements was the LA Kings moving from 7th position to 3rd thanks to the draft lottery. However, all teams can only move as high as 4 spots above where they will finish the season. For example, the 14th place team cannot pick higher than 10th overall in the draft. The 10th spot can’t climb higher than 6th overall pick, and so on.

Assuming the season were to end today, the Los Angeles Kings would have a 25% chance of picking #1. If the Kings did pick #1, I’d be willing to bet you Stamkos would be wearing a King’s jersey.

The 2nd to last team has an 18.8% chance of picking 1st. And the rest of the draft lottery numbers are divided between the remaining 14 teams, with the 14th place team given a 0.5% chance of moving up in the 2008 Entry Draft.

The NHL 2008 Entry Draft Lottery will take place this Monday, April 7th at 8 pm eastern on TSN, Versus or the NHL Network. Check back here for details and final positioning for the draft lottery on the Ultimate Hockey Warrior.

Read about my post “If the NHL 2008 Draft was Today”, detailing picks 1-10 and draft picks 11-20.