The Stampede is on!

The Leafs love us, their fans. They love every one of us diehard true blue Leafs fans, I'm sure of it. Want to know how I'm sure? Fresh off of beating everyone's least favorite team the Ottawa Senators, the "best" team in the East, the Leafs go ahead and lose 8-0 to the Florida Panthers just to get back into the Stampede for Stamkos.

LA, feeling apologetic for ruining everything in 1993 and then giving a cup to Montreal was nice enough to hammer the Rangers, and Tampa Bay realized it had too many star players so they decided to beat St. Louis. That means the Stampede for Stamkos ^{TM, R, Patent Pending} looks like this:


Team GP Points
---- -- ------
LAK 55 47
TAM 54 49
TOR 55 51
CHI 52 51
EDM 55 53

Toronto isn't in the clear lead, and they've got some serious losing to do to make sure Chicago and Anaheim Edmonton don't shark the Leafs' chance at Stamkos. There's an important word in that last sentence: chance. Based on the lottery system, the bottom five teams in the NHL's standings have a chance at the first pick.

So then, based on the lottery, how often has the worst team in the league gotten the first pick? From here, we get this list:

Year Team Result Selected
---- ---- ------ --------
2000 NYI Moved from 5th to 1st DiPietro
2001 ATL Moved from 3rd to 1st Kovalchuk
2002 FLA Moved from 3rd to 1st Nash *
2003 FLA Moved from 4th to 1st Fleury *
2004 WSH Moved from 3rd to 1st Ovechkin
2005 PIT n/a Crosby
2006 STL Retained 1st selection Johnson
2007 CHI Moved from 5th to 1st Kane

In the eight years listed above, the worst team in the league only kept the first pick once. The Penguins had as bad a shot as anyone in the Sidney Crosby lottery, so it could be said 2/8. That means even finishing dead last the Leafs have about a 25% chance at Stamkos. However, 25% is a better probability than 12%, and if you're going to finish 27th, you might as well go for 30th.

Edit: For clarification, my use of 25% refers to the chances of the worst team getting the first pick in the last eight years. This is confusing due to the fact that the worst team has a 25% chance of winning the lottery, however since a team can move up at most 4 spots in the draft lottery this means that the worst team has a 48% chance, in theory, of getting the best draft pick. Here's the only link I could find to explain the current draft lottery rules, if someone has a better link I'm all ears.