Lucky Jets are in like Finn

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/05/2016 (3536 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

At the end of a season marked by frustration and disappointment, April turned out to be a pretty good month for the Winnipeg Jets.

The Jets’ exclusion from the Stanley Cup playoffs had been known for weeks, but the team finished the regular season on something of an optimistic note, winning its last four games and posting a 4-0-1 record in April.

Fast forward to the final day of the month Saturday night and the Jets’ only winning streak of the season continued in the NHL’s draft lottery.

Once the Ping-Pong balls were pulled from three separate drawings to determine the first three places in the first round of the 2016 NHL Draft, the Jets had vaulted from sixth to second.

The draft, which will see the Toronto Maple Leafs go first, takes place June 24-25 in Buffalo’s First Niagara Center.

It’s the first instance of good draft-lottery luck for the Jets since the 2011 relocation.

That year, the soon-to-be-moved Atlanta Thrashers finished with the sixth-worst record in the regular season but were bumped down to No. 7 in the draft after the New Jersey Devils won the lottery.

Winnipeg’s fortunes in the lottery had been neutral since, unaffected by the annual drawing for the first-overall pick.

When the NHL moved to three lotteries this season — to take even more incentive out of “tanking” for the top pick — the Jets’ good fortune put them in position to claim one of the top-three skaters widely regarded as NHL-ready this fall.

Centre Auston Matthews, who was ineligible for last June’s draft because his birthday was Sept. 17, 1997, two days after the cut-off, is the consensus No. 1 pick this June.

He is ranked first by NHL Central Scouting on a list of European skaters (Matthews played for Zurich in the Swiss national league) and first overall in ISS Hockey’s April rankings.

Matthews was second in the league’s MVP voting after scoring 24 goals and 46 points in 36 games.

The next two are Finns Patrik Laine, a right-shot left-winger, and Jesse Puljujarvi, a right-winger.

Laine, at 6-4, had 17 goals and 33 points in 46 games in the Finnish Liiga and added 10 goals and 15 points in 18 playoff games to help Tappara to the championship. A few days after his 18th birthday earlier in April, he was voted MVP of the playoffs.

Laine is No. 2 on the NHL European-skater list and No. 3 in ISS’s overall list.

Puljujarvi, who turns 18 Saturday, is a 6-3 winger who led the world junior championship in scoring with 17 points. He posted 13 goals and 28 points in 50 regular-season games for Karpat.

Puljujarvi is slotted at No. 3 on the NHL’s central scouting list for Europeans and No. 2 overall in ISS’s list.

The Jets entered Saturday’s lottery in Toronto with a 7.5 per cent chance to win the first-overall pick. Toronto took it, making good on its 20 per cent chance, best among all the non-playoff teams because it finished last overall in the standings.

In the second drawing with Toronto excluded, the Jets’ odds went up to 9.375 per cent.

Of their 75 possible combinations of the 14 lottery balls, their 60th one on the numerical list, Nos. 5-10-7-14, was the one that paid off. Once the first three balls came out, the Jets still had two balls in play, Nos. 3 and 14. At that stage, the Buffalo Sabres were the only other team with two shots at a winning combination for the second selection.

In the first drawing, the Jets had two balls in play after the first three balls, Nos. 6-8-5, came out. Toronto’s lone shot on that final ball paid off when it came up No. 13.

The actual lottery took place about an hour before the results were made public on the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast.

Deputy commissioner Bill Daly revealed the results in reverse order, slotting in teams starting at No. 14 (Boston). When he revealed the ninth pick would go to Montreal, the eighth to Buffalo and the seventh to Arizona, it became clear the Jets had not been leap-frogged by anyone.

When Daly showed the sixth selection going to Calgary, that meant the Jets, who were in the sixth slot heading in, had won one of the lotteries and had moved into the top three.

The last three reveals put Columbus into the third choice, up from fourth, and then showed the Leafs as winners, leaving Winnipeg with No. 2.

Edmonton, which had made the first overall pick in four of the last six years, fell two spots from second to fourth, and the Vancouver Canucks also went down two, from third to fifth.

As of today, the Jets have three picks in this year’s first 36, Nos. 2, 22 and 36.

They acquired the other first-round pick in the February trade that sent captain Andrew Ladd to the Chicago Blackhawks.

The Hawks finished with the fifth-best record of teams that made the playoffs, but the NHL’s complicated rules for the order of draft selection for playoff teams include a re-order for clubs that don’t get through the second round of the playoffs and that, along with the results that have occurred so far, appear to have that picked locked in now at No. 22.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca