The Pens come close, but narrowly miss out as the Islanders win the draft lottery
The Pittsburgh Penguins came oh, so, close to getting the first overall pick by way of winning the lottery draft on Monday night.
In an electric, but sometimes confusing televised lottery draft, the NHL conducted a live drawing of four lottery balls. The four balls made were then matched to combinations setup to determine which club would win.
After three balls were selected in the first drawing, the Penguins were in remarkably good shape. If the final ball ended up being a 1 or a 10, it would have matched their combinations and they would have moved up to gain the first overall selection.
With 3 balls down, 7 teams are still in the mix.
Top 4 all have 18.2% chance: PIT, PHI, NYI, CHIhttps://t.co/EqXsfQvWK5 https://t.co/gtNo9Tklqu pic.twitter.com/EaBe9qOYSe
— PuckPedia (@PuckPedia) May 5, 2025
Unfortunately for Pittsburgh, that wasn’t the way the balls bounced. The Islanders, who had even worse odds than the Pens, ended up coming up from the 10th spot to win the draft lottery.
That moment was the high point for the Penguins on this night. The drawing for the second pick ended up going even worse — the Utah Mammoth ended up winning it, despite having the 14th worst odds to do so. The newly named Mammoth move up 10 spots to pick fourth overall.
As a result, the Pens go from the ninth position down to drafting 11th overall. There was only a 1.7% chance that two teams would bump up past Pittsburgh, but what do ya know – it ended up happening.
Thus, the Pens early in their rebuild learn a tough lesson first-hand: with these lottery draft rules it becomes impossible to count on a bad season parlaying into a top draft pick. Unlike 20 or 40 years ago, just being bad doesn’t guarantee much, and this year was an especially unfortunate draw for the worst teams in the league with two longshots winning the lottery…But it was really close to happening for the Pens tonight, had only that fourth ball ended up getting drawn a little differently.