.jpg)
1 hour ago
3
Some draft lotteries are forgotten. Some go down in history.
This is one of the latter. The Toronto Maple Leafs entered Tuesday night with the fifth-best lottery odds. They left it with the No. 1 overall pick and the right to draft Gavin McKenna.
If McKenna is indeed the pick, and if the young Canadian is even close to as good as advertised, this will be luck that has only been matched a few times in sports.
MORE: Sabres' storybook season is real, and Stanley Cup dreams are valid
It's more than just good fortune, though. When the Sharks got Macklin Celebrini, or the Oilers got Connor McDavid, or the Penguins got Sidney Crosby, that was good fortune, too.
This has another layer to it. There's an element of circumstance overlapping with the fortune.
The most recent example came in the NBA, when only months after the absurd trading away of Luka Doncic, the Dallas Mavericks won the lottery and got the right to draft Cooper Flagg even though they were slated to land outside the top-10 picks.
The NBA is famous for these kind of moments, the ones that make you say the lottery was rigged.
Oh, sure, the Cleveland Cavaliers won the lottery the year the kid from Akron, LeBron James, was in the draft.
And yeah, the Chicago Bulls for the Chicago kid, Derrick Rose.
And when the New York Knicks needed a savior, the league handed them Patrick Ewing.
Now the Maple Leafs, coming off their worst season in a long time, get the young Canadian to potentially come save the day.
MORE: Canadiens win a playoff game like none other in NHL history
Toronto hasn't even played in a Stanley Cup Final in 60 years. They've done so much wrong since then.
Even this offseason was shaping up as a nightmare if Auston Matthews decided he wanted to leave.
Instead, the Maple Leafs won the lottery. They can get their LeBron, their Flagg. They can turn everything around all because luck was on their side in a hard-to-believe way.
English (US)