Red Wings to Pick Ninth After Draft Lottery

The Detroit Red Wings will have the ninth overall selection in the 2017 NHL Entry Draft.

Detroit had the seventh-best odds of getting the first overall pick in via Saturday’s Draft Lottery.  Instead they dropped two spots, leapfrogged by the Philadelphia Flyers and Dallas Stars.  The Flyers will pick second and the Stars third with the New Jersey Devils picking moving up from fifth to pick first.

This leaves the Wings among the losers of the lottery.  They didn’t fare as badly as the Colorado Avalanche, Vancouver Canucks, Vegas Golden Knights, or Arizona Coyotes – who each dropped three spots – but they were one of only two teams to drop two spots in the draft.

The annoying thing is that the Devils won the first overall pick with the league’s fourth-worst record.  On March 15, the Red Wings were predicted to finish in that spot.  This changed because of Vancouver’s catastrophic drop in the standings in the season’s final weeks and a series of overtime wins by Detroit after the team was already eliminated from the playoffs.  It could be said that all of those points the team earned while playing for pride cost them the first overall draft pick.