Edmonton Oilers Win Draft Lottery, What Now?

Congratulations Connor McDavid, you’re about to be an Edmonton Oiler. Cheer up, will you?

For the fourth time in six years, the ping pong balls went the Oilers’ way and they won the right to make the first overall selection at this year’s NHL Draft on June 26th.

What does this mean for the Ottawa Senators?

First of all, it’s fantastic to see McDavid land outside the Atlantic Division and the Eastern Conference. It would have been painful to see an organization from within the Atlantic, especially Toronto, win the lottery and ensure that the Senators would have faced McDavid and Jack Eichel on a regular basis.

More importantly, tonight’s events will simply add to the staple of young forwards that the Oilers have accrued — Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jordan Eberle, Leon Draisaitl and Nail Yakupov — over the past few years. For an organization that has struggled to identify and develop talent outside the first rounds of the past few drafts, the challenge for the Oilers’ brass has been to surround this young talent with good players, especially on the blue line and at the goaltending positions.

For the Senators, a team that has been linked in trade rumours to the Edmonton Oilers, one has to wonder whether tonight’s events will give the Oilers the confidence to pull the trigger on a deal that sends one of these forwards to Ottawa in exchange for some combination of assets that fills a few of the many holes on the Oilers’ roster.

Back in January, TSN‘s Darren Dreger revealed that the Senators and Oilers had engaged in trade conversations involving Senators backup Robin Lehner.

“Not really because I don’t think they know what they had yet in Robin Lehner. And that’s the big issue. Teams have called on Robin Lehner. In fact, I think that there’s been communication in the past between the Oilers and Ottawa Senators specific to Robin Lehner.

“But as much as Bryan Murray and the Sens want Robin Lehner to develop into their star goaltender, he’s not doing that yet. So the value in Craig Anderson from a Senators perspective is immeasurable. Maybe things change in terms of his availability as you get closer to the trade deadline, or in the offseason, but right now, if it weren’t for Craig Anderson, the Ottawa Senators would be a far worse team than what they are right now.”

Looking at Ottawa’s internal budget and the emergence and play of Andrew Hammond, maybe that line of thinking has changed. With a number of important players slated to hit restricted free agency, it’s possible that their performance this season has raised their respective price tags higher than the organization could have ever possibly considered. Keeping these two things in mind, maybe it’s possible that the Senators have enough confidence in a Hammond/Lehner tandem (note: Hammond is slated to hit UFA this summer) to consider moving the more expensive Anderson – which in turn would free up more money and allow the Senators to re-allocate this money accordingly to re-sign their young players and address other positions of need.

So yeah, maybe a prospective trade between these two organizations would have happened this summer anyway, but at the very least, today’s news could help rekindle whatever trade dialogues occurred earlier in the season.