How Does the NHL Draft Lottery Work? Two Draws, Ten Spots
How the NHL draft lottery works: 16 non-playoff teams, two weighted draws, a ten-spot limit on climbing, and the odds for every finishing position.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NHL Season & Draft25 min read
- Clubs in the lottery
- 16
- Draws held
- 2
- Most places a winner can climb
- 10
- First NHL draft lottery
- 1995
On May 5, 2025, in a television studio in New Jersey, the National Hockey League did something it had avoided for 30 years: it let the audience watch the balls come out of the machine. Four of them popped up in sequence, the combination belonged to the New York Islanders, and a club that had gone into the night with a 3.5 percent chance held the first pick in the draft.
That drawing shows the whole system at work. The NHL draft lottery takes the 16 clubs that missed the playoffs, weights them so the worst records have the best chance, and holds two draws. Each draw's winner moves up, by no more than ten places, and so only the first two picks can change hands. Everything from the third pick to the sixteenth then falls in reverse order of the standings. The last-place team cannot drop lower than third.
How the NHL draft lottery works, from the standings to the stage
Thirty-two clubs, 16 playoff places. The 16 left over are the lottery field, and their seeding is nothing more than the regular-season standings read upside down: fewest points is seed one, next fewest is seed two, and on up to the best team that missed, at 16. Ties in points are settled with the same tiebreakers the league uses at the top of the standings, applied in reverse.
The size of the field has tracked the size of the league. With 30 clubs there were 14 lottery teams. Vegas made it 15, and Seattle's arrival as the 32nd franchise made it 16, half the league. Making the playoffs by any route takes a club out of the drawing entirely. A team that sneaks in as the last wild card and is swept in the first round picks no higher than 17th, which is why a general manager on the bubble in March sometimes faces an awkward calculation about which side of the line he would prefer to finish on.
- The field is setThe 16 clubs that missed the playoffs are seeded in reverse order of regular-season points. Each receives a block of four-number combinations matching its odds.
- First drawFour balls are drawn from 14. The club holding that combination wins and moves up toward first overall, by a maximum of ten places.
- Second drawThe balls go back and four more are drawn. A combination belonging to the first winner, or the one unassigned combination, means a redraw.
- Winners are slottedThe second winner moves up toward second overall under the same ten-place limit.
- Everyone else lines upThe remaining clubs fill the open slots in reverse order of the standings. Nobody can be pushed down more than two places.
- The rest of the first roundPicks 17 through 32 go to the playoff clubs, ordered by how far each advanced and by regular-season points.
The procedure under the rules in force since the 2022 lottery. Only the first round of the draft is affected; later rounds follow the standings.
Three things about this are often misheard on broadcast night.
First, the lottery is for the first round only. In rounds two through seven the non-playoff clubs pick in straight reverse order of the standings, lottery or no lottery, so a club that falls from first to third still opens the second round.
Second, a draw is for a club's position, and a pick can be owned by someone else. More on that below.
Third, there is no draw for third place. Between 2016 and 2020 there was, and plenty of fans still assume the top three are all in play.
The drawing takes place a few weeks after the regular season ends, with the playoffs under way. By then the 84 games that set the seeding are done; how that schedule is built is covered in our guide to how many games are in an NHL season.
NHL draft lottery chances by finishing position
The odds are steepest at the bottom and flatten quickly. They have been set at their present values since the league reached 32 clubs.
| Seed (fewest points first) | Chance of winning the first draw | Combinations out of 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 18.5% | 185 |
| 2 | 13.5% | 135 |
| 3 | 11.5% | 115 |
| 4 | 9.5% | 95 |
| 5 | 8.5% | 85 |
| 6 | 7.5% | 75 |
| 7 | 6.5% | 65 |
| 8 | 6.0% | 60 |
| 9 | 5.0% | 50 |
| 10 | 3.5% | 35 |
| 11 | 3.0% | 30 |
| 12 | 2.5% | 25 |
| 13 | 2.0% | 20 |
| 14 | 1.5% | 15 |
| 15 | 0.5% | 5 |
| 16 | 0.5% | 5 |
Each percentage is literal. A club with an 18.5 percent chance has been assigned 185 of the 1,000 live combinations, and a club at 0.5 percent has five.
Read the top of the chart against the bottom. The worst club in the league is more likely to lose the first draw than to win it, by better than four to one. The bottom three seeds together hold 43.5 percent. That is the design: finishing last is the best position to be in and nowhere near a guarantee.
The second draw uses the same blocks of combinations, minus the first winner's. If the first draw went to seed three, its 115 combinations are dead for the second, and any of them coming up means the balls are drawn again. The practical effect is that every remaining club's chance in the second draw is a little better than its listed figure.
A club that holds two lottery picks, its own and one acquired in a trade, does not get to pool them. Each pick keeps the block of combinations that goes with the seed it came from, and each is slotted separately once the draws are done.
The ten-spot limit, and how 18.5 percent becomes 25.5
A draw winner does not automatically go to the front. Since 2022, a club can climb a maximum of ten places.
For seeds one through eleven the limit changes nothing, because first overall is ten places or fewer away. For the five clubs seeded 12 through 16, it is the whole story. They are in the drawing and can win it, and they cannot pick first.
| Seed that wins the first draw | Where it picks | Who picks first |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1st | Seed 1 |
| 2 through 11 | 1st | The winner |
| 12 | 2nd | Seed 1 |
| 13 | 3rd | Seed 1 |
| 14 | 4th | Seed 1 |
| 15 | 5th | Seed 1 |
| 16 | 6th | Seed 1 |
That bottom block of the table is where the last-place club's real number comes from. It picks first when it wins the first draw, an 18.5 percent chance. It also picks first whenever seeds 12 through 16 win it, because none of them can get past it, and those five clubs hold 2.5, 2.0, 1.5, 0.5 and 0.5 percent. Seven percent between them. Add the two and the club with the fewest points has a 25.5 percent chance of making the first selection.
The limit was the league's answer to a specific complaint: that a club which had missed the playoffs by a point or two, with a roster good enough to contend, should not be handed the best teenager in the world as a consolation prize. Under the three-draw format of the late 2010s that kind of jump kept happening. Philadelphia went from 13th to second in 2017. Carolina went from 11th to second a year later, and Chicago from 12th to third the year after that.
The 2025 drawing showed the limit doing its job in the second draw. Utah, seeded 14th, won it. Without the cap that would have meant the second pick. With it, Utah moved up ten places to fourth, and San Jose and Chicago, the two worst records, picked second and third.
What the cap does not do
It does not stop a middling team from winning. The Islanders were seeded tenth in 2025, exactly ten places from the top, and went all the way. An eleventh seed could do the same. The cap removes only the last five clubs from contention for the first pick, and those five never had more than a 7 percent chance between them.
How far a team can fall: two places and no more
Only two draws are held, so only two clubs can jump over anyone. That simple fact sets a floor under every seed.
- 16Clubs in the drawing
- 2Picks decided by a draw
- 10Most places a winner can climb
- 2Most places any club can fall
The rules in force since the 2022 lottery. The top-three guarantee follows from there being only two draws.
The last-place club picks first, second or third. Seed two picks no lower than fourth, seed five no lower than seventh, seed nine no lower than eleventh. For the two best non-playoff clubs the floor is tighter still, because there are not two clubs below seed 15 to pass it, and none below seed 16.
How often does the worst team actually slide? More often than not. Working through the published odds, the club with the fewest points picks first 25.5 percent of the time, second about 18.8 percent of the time and third about 55.7 percent. The single most likely outcome for the league's worst team is that two other clubs win the draws and it picks third.
The short record under the present rules has been kinder than that. In the five lotteries from 2022 through 2026, the last-place club picked first twice, Montreal in 2022 and San Jose in 2024, and second twice, Anaheim in 2023 and San Jose again in 2025. The 55.7 percent outcome took until the fifth drawing to arrive: in 2026 Toronto won the first draw from the fifth seed, San Jose won the second, and last-place Vancouver picked third. Five drawings is far too few to read anything into.
That is a much softer landing than the one the format offered from 2016 through 2020, when three draws were held and the worst team could fall to fourth. It happened to Colorado in 2017, after a 48-point season, and to Detroit in 2020, after a year in which the Red Wings won 17 of 71 games. Both clubs had done the one thing the system is supposed to compensate, and both watched three teams go past them. The league went back to two draws the following year.
Can the last-place team lose the first pick?
Yes, and it usually does: three times in four. What it cannot lose is a place in the top three. In a draft with one franchise player and a steep drop after him, that distinction is the difference between a rebuilt team and a long wait. In a draft that is three deep at the top, it hardly matters.
The twice-in-five-years rule
A second limit was adopted alongside the ten-spot cap. A club may move up by winning a lottery draw no more than twice in any five-year period, with the count starting at the 2022 lottery.
The model case is easy to name. Edmonton made the first selection in four of the six drafts from 2010 through 2015, twice by finishing last and keeping the pick, and twice by winning the lottery from further up, the second of those bringing Connor McDavid. No rule was broken. The run still left the rest of the league with the feeling that the reward for prolonged failure had no ceiling, and the twice-in-five rule reads as a delayed answer to it.
The rule counts moves up. That qualification matters more than the headline. A last-place club that wins the first draw has not moved anywhere, since it was already at the front of the line, and retaining a position is not the same as improving one. So a team can finish last several years running, keep the first pick each time the balls fall its way, and never trigger the limit. What it restricts is the lucky jump, not the earned position.
The window rolls. Take a hypothetical club that climbs by winning a draw in 2023 and again in 2025. It has used both of its moves, and it stays barred from a third through the 2027 lottery, because every five-year span up to that point contains both wins. In 2028 the 2023 win drops out of the window and the club is eligible again.
In practice the rule has had little to bite on so far. Two upward wins in five years is a lot of luck for one franchise, and a club that has had it is usually no longer bad enough to be in the lottery's upper reaches. It is best understood as insurance against a repeat of something that happened once.
Inside the machine: 14 balls and 1,001 combinations
The equipment is the same kind the NBA has used, and the mathematics is a piece of high-school counting.
Fourteen ping-pong balls, numbered 1 through 14, go into an air-mix machine. Four are drawn. The order they come out in is ignored, so a draw of 3, 9, 11 and 14 is the same result as 14, 3, 11 and 9. The number of different four-ball sets that can be made from 14 balls is 1,001.
The count is quick to check. There are 14 choices for the first ball, 13 for the second, 12 for the third and 11 for the fourth, which multiplies out to 24,024 ordered sequences. Each set of four balls can come out in 24 different orders, and 24,024 divided by 24 is 1,001.
One thousand of those are handed out among the 16 clubs before the drawing, in blocks that match the odds table: 185 for the first seed, 135 for the second, down to five each for the last two. The one combination left over belongs to nobody. If it comes up, the draw is void and the four balls are drawn again.
That design is why the odds come in neat tenths of a percent. A thousand live combinations means each one is worth exactly 0.1 percent, and any set of odds that adds up to 100 can be dealt out in whole combinations.
Who is in the room
The drawing is run by league staff under the eye of an outside accounting firm, Ernst & Young in recent years, whose representatives certify the assignment of combinations beforehand and the result afterward. The combinations each club holds are fixed and recorded before a ball moves. After the first draw all 14 balls go back into the machine for the second. A second-draw combination that belongs to the club that has already won is simply discarded and drawn again.
Nothing about the procedure is exotic. The NBA drew its lottery with the same 14 balls from the mid-1990s through 2026, and every lottery conspiracy theory in either sport has had to get around the same obstacle, which is that the combinations are assigned and audited in advance.
From sealed cards to a live draw
For most of its history the NHL lottery was an event nobody saw. The balls were drawn in a closed room shortly before the broadcast, and the people who witnessed it stayed there until the result was public. What went on air was the reveal.
The reveal had a format of its own. The deputy commissioner stood beside a stack of oversized cards, each carrying a club's logo, and turned them over from the last pick in the lottery toward the first. For most of the count the cards came up in the expected order. The moment one did not, when the club that should have been at ten was not there, everybody watching knew that team had won a draw. The rest of the countdown was arithmetic.
The show usually paused before the last three cards, by which point the audience at home had worked out who was still unaccounted for. In the years the league brought club executives into the studio, they sat in a row and tried to look as though they had not.
It made decent television and bad public relations. A drawing held in private will always invite suspicion, however carefully it is audited, and the league eventually accepted that the cure was cheap. In 2025 the drawing was shown as it happened: the machine on camera, the balls coming up one at a time, the combination checked against the chart in real time.
The first live night produced what was still, through 2026, the longest climb to first overall by any seeded club, a tenth seed with 35 combinations out of 1,000. That did the format a favor. An unlikely result drawn in public is a far easier thing to live with than an unlikely result announced by placard.
The site's wider explainer on how the NHL draft works picks up from the point the order is set, with eligibility, the seven rounds and what a club actually owns when it calls a name.
Traded picks: one drawing, two franchises' drafts
The lottery is drawn by club. The pick belongs to whoever holds it. Most years those are the same thing for most of the field, and the exceptions are where the evening gets tense in a second city.
A first-round pick traded with no conditions simply takes the original club's seed and result. San Jose sent its 2020 first-round pick to Ottawa in the Erik Karlsson trade; the Sharks then finished with the third-worst record, and Ottawa went into that lottery holding two of the top three seeds. The Senators used the San Jose pick, third overall, on Tim Stutzle.
Conditions make it more interesting. General managers who trade a first-round pick during a bad stretch usually protect it, most often for the top five or the top ten: if the pick lands inside the protected range, the trading club keeps it and owes a later one instead.
The Matt Duchene trade of November 2017 is the cleanest lesson in how that can go. Ottawa sent Colorado a first-round pick with top-ten protection for 2018. The Senators collapsed, the pick came in fourth after the lottery, and they kept it and drafted Brady Tkachuk, which left them owing their 2019 first-round pick outright. They then finished last in the league. Colorado, a playoff team, went into the 2019 lottery holding the best odds on the board and came away with the fourth pick, Bowen Byram.
Protection and the two-place fall
Because a club can drop at most two places, a protection clause interacts with the lottery in a predictable way. A top-five protected pick held by the fourth seed can fall to sixth and change hands. A top-ten protected pick held by the eighth seed is safe whatever the balls do. And a top-two protected pick, like the one Chicago owed Columbus in 2022 from the Seth Jones trade, stays home only if the club wins a draw. Chicago did not, and Columbus picked sixth.
These clauses are negotiated months earlier, often around the March cutoff described in our guide to the NHL trade deadline rules, by executives who know the floor arithmetic by heart.
Lottery nights that redirected franchises
A handful of drawings changed the direction of clubs for a decade or more.
| Year | Draw winner | Position before the draw | Pick after | Player selected |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Los Angeles | 7th | 3rd | Aki Berg |
| 2005 | Pittsburgh | One of 30 clubs | 1st | Sidney Crosby |
| 2007 | Chicago | 5th | 1st | Patrick Kane |
| 2015 | Edmonton | 3rd | 1st | Connor McDavid |
| 2017 | New Jersey | 5th | 1st | Nico Hischier |
| 2023 | Chicago | 3rd | 1st | Connor Bedard |
| 2025 | New York Islanders | 10th | 1st | Matthew Schaefer |
2005. There had been no season, so there were no standings to reverse. The league put all 30 clubs into a single weighted draw. Each started with three balls and lost one for each playoff appearance in the previous three seasons and each first overall pick in the previous four drafts, down to a minimum of one. Four clubs kept all three: Buffalo, Columbus, the New York Rangers and Pittsburgh. With 48 balls in the drum, each of those four had a 6.25 percent chance. Pittsburgh's came up, and Sidney Crosby went to a franchise whose future in its city was in real doubt.
2007. Chicago had the fifth-worst record and, under the old schedule of odds, an 8.1 percent chance. Five was the last seed from which a club could reach first overall at the time. The Blackhawks won, took Patrick Kane a year after drafting Jonathan Toews third, and had the Stanley Cup three years later. Philadelphia, which had finished last by a distance, picked second.
2015. Buffalo had finished last in a season its own supporters treated as a means to an end. Late that March, a home crowd in Buffalo cheered an overtime goal by the visiting Arizona Coyotes, the club the Sabres were racing to the bottom. Buffalo held a 20 percent chance at the drawing. Edmonton, third from the bottom at 11.5 percent, won it and drafted McDavid. Buffalo took Jack Eichel second.
2025. The Islanders' win, from tenth, with a 3.5 percent chance.
The year it took two drawings
The 2020 lottery was held around a season that had not finished, and it remains the strangest in the event's history.
The regular season stopped in March. When the league planned its return it invited 24 clubs back, leaving seven whose seasons were over. Eight of the 24 would then lose in a qualifying round and become lottery teams too, but nobody could know which eight when the drawing was scheduled for June.
So the first phase was drawn with placeholders. The seven eliminated clubs held the seven best sets of odds. The other eight slots were labeled Team A through Team H and stood in for qualifying-round losers yet to be determined. The eight placeholders held 24.5 percent between them.
One of them won. A slot called Team E, with a 2.5 percent chance, took the first draw, and the league found itself announcing that the first overall pick belonged to a club that would be identified later. Detroit, which had the worst record in hockey by a wide margin, dropped to fourth.
The second phase came in August, after the qualifying round. The eight losers went into a new drawing with an equal chance each, 12.5 percent. The New York Rangers, swept in three games by Carolina, won it and selected Alexis Lafreniere.
The rest of that top five shows how much one evening rearranged. Los Angeles moved up to second and took Quinton Byfield. Ottawa, holding its own pick and San Jose's, selected Tim Stutzle third and Jake Sanderson fifth. Detroit, between them at fourth, took Lucas Raymond.
Nothing in the rules was violated, and the result was exactly as likely as the odds said. It was also the outcome most damaging to the argument that a lottery exists to help the weakest teams, and the reforms announced the following spring are hard to read as a coincidence.
How the NHL draft lottery rules got here
Before 1995 there was no lottery. The worst team picked first. Two episodes wore that arrangement out: the race to the bottom between Pittsburgh and New Jersey in 1983-84, with Mario Lemieux as the prize, and the 1992-93 Ottawa Senators, whose management was investigated and fined by the league over remarks about losing for the sake of the first pick, which became Alexandre Daigle. Daigle's contract had consequences of its own, covered in our guide to the NHL entry-level contract.
| Lottery year | What changed |
|---|---|
| 1995 | First lottery. One draw among the non-playoff clubs; the winner climbs no more than four places, so only the five worst can pick first |
| 2005 | One-time draw among all 30 clubs after the canceled season |
| 2013 | Four-place limit removed; any non-playoff club can win first overall |
| 2015 | Odds flattened; the last-place club's chance in the draw falls from 25 percent to 20 |
| 2016 | Three draws, for the first, second and third picks; the last-place club can fall to fourth |
| 2021 | Back to two draws; the last-place club can fall no lower than third |
| 2022 | Ten-spot limit on climbing; twice-in-five-years limit begins to count |
| 2025 | Drawing shown live for the first time |
The original system was more protective of bad teams than its reputation suggests. With a four-place cap, a win by any club seeded sixth or lower moved that club up and left first overall where it was. The last-place team's chance in the draw was 25 percent, and its chance of actually picking first was 48.2 percent.
The chart is the league changing its mind. From 2013 it steadily reduced what last place was worth, on the theory that a smaller reward would mean less deliberate losing. By 2020 the worst team had less than a one-in-five chance at the top and could fall to fourth. Then the 2022 rules pushed the figure back up to about one in four, by a side door: no change to the listed odds, only a cap that returns the pick to the bottom when a team too far up the standings wins.
Expansion briefly complicated the table as well. Vegas in 2017 and Seattle in 2021 were each given the odds of the third-worst club for their first draft, which shaved every other team's share that year. Both arrivals are covered in our history of NHL expansion.
Does the NHL lottery stop tanking, and how it differs from the NBA's
Partly. It cannot do more than that, and the league's stock answer to the question misses where the problem is.
The standing position from the NHL office is that players and coaches do not lose on purpose. That is true. Players are competing for their next contract and coaches for their jobs. But nobody has ever accused the bench. Rosters are assembled by front offices, and a general manager who trades three veterans for draft picks in February, then starts a rookie goaltender through March, has lowered his club's finishing position without asking anyone to give less than full effort. The lottery changes the price of that decision. It does not forbid it.
What flatter odds and capped jumps do is lower the reward at the margin. Finishing 32nd instead of 30th is worth an extra seven percentage points in the first draw and a guaranteed top-three pick instead of a top-five one. That is something. It is a good deal less than the near coin flip of the 1990s.
The NBA took the same idea further with the format it used from 2019 through its 2026 drawing, and the comparison is instructive.
| Feature | NHL lottery | NBA lottery (format used 2019 through 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Clubs in the drawing | 16 | 14 |
| Picks decided by draw | 2 | 4 |
| Best odds in the first draw | 18.5 percent, one club | 14 percent, shared by the three worst |
| Lowest the worst club can pick | 3rd | 5th |
| Limit on how far a winner climbs | Ten places | None |
| Limit on repeat winners | Twice in five years | None |
Basketball flattened the top and let more picks move; hockey kept a clear favorite and fenced in the long shots. The difference follows from the sports. One teenager can turn an NBA franchise around inside two seasons, so the temptation to lose for him is stronger and the league dilutes the prize harder. A hockey prospect, even a great one, plays a third of the game and usually needs years.
Basketball has not finished adjusting. In May 2026 the NBA approved a replacement that takes effect with the 2027 draft: a wider field of 16 teams, fewer lottery balls for the three worst records than for the clubs just above them, and a bar on any team winning the first pick in consecutive years. That goes well past anything the NHL has tried, since it makes the very bottom of the standings a worse place to finish than the rung above it.
The full NBA mechanism is set out in our explainer on how the NBA draft lottery works, and the WNBA's version, which weighs two seasons of results, in our guide to the WNBA draft lottery. The NFL has never used one at all; its method is in our guide to how the NFL draft order is determined.
The alternatives that keep being proposed
Two ideas come up whenever the subject does.
One is to flatten the odds completely, giving every non-playoff club the same chance. It would end tanking for position overnight and would also sever the link between need and help, which is the only reason to have a reverse-order draft at all.
The other is usually called the Gold Plan, after the researcher who proposed it in 2012. Draft order would be set by the number of points a club earns after it is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. The worst teams are eliminated first and so have the most games in which to collect points, which keeps the advantage with them, and every one of those games becomes worth winning. The Professional Women's Hockey League adopted a version of it for its first pick. The NHL has not shown much interest, and the objection is practical: it rewards a bad team for getting hot in March, which may say more about its goaltender than its need.
The present system is a compromise that nobody loves and most people can defend. It gives the worst team a one-in-four chance at first overall and a certain top-three pick, lets a mediocre team get lucky now and then, and stops a good team that barely missed the playoffs from walking off with the best player. More of our American sports explainers are collected on the USA guides hub.