NHL Draft Lottery Odds Explained: Full Table by Position

The NHL draft lottery decides only the top two picks, gives the league’s worst team an 18.5% shot at first overall, and caps how far any team can climb at 10 spots. Everything below the top two is simply reverse order of the standings. If you want the fast answer to “what are my team’s odds,” the full table is below.

The full NHL lottery odds table

Sixteen teams miss the playoffs, and all 16 are entered. Odds run heaviest at the bottom of the standings and taper to almost nothing near the playoff line. These are the standard weightings the league uses each year, per the NHL’s published lottery format:

Standings position (worst to best non-playoff team)	Odds of 1st overall
1	18.5%
2	13.5%
3	11.5%
4	9.5%
5	8.5%
6	7.5%
7	6.5%
8	6.0%
9	5.0%
10	3.5%
11	3.0%
12	2.5%
13	2.0%
14	1.5%
15	0.5%
16	0.5%

Why there are only two draws

The league runs two separate draws, one for the first overall pick and one for the second. After those two winners are set, every other team falls into line by reverse standings. This is a change from the old system, which used three draws and let more teams leapfrog. Trimming it to two draws in 2021 kept the reward for finishing dead last meaningful, which live trackers such as Tankathon’s NHL page recalculate as the standings shift late in the season.

The 10-spot movement cap

Here is the rule that quietly shapes the whole thing: a team can move up a maximum of 10 places in the lottery. That single cap has a big knock-on effect. Because first overall requires a 10-spot climb at most, only the 11 worst teams can possibly win it. A club sitting 12th-worst is locked out of the top pick entirely, no matter how the balls fall, and can rise only into the second-pick range at best.

That cap is the main reason a truly awful season still matters. Finishing 15th of 16 non-playoff teams gives you a 0.5% lottery chance and, thanks to the movement cap, no path at all to the first pick. Bottoming out is the only way to guarantee a shot at the top of the board.

The anti-tanking guardrails

The league has added rails to discourage teams from losing on purpose. A club can win a lottery draw no more than twice in any five-year window, so a franchise cannot repeatedly vault up the order season after season. Combined with the flattened odds, which give the worst team 18.5% rather than a near-guarantee, the format is built so that tanking improves your chances without ever making a top pick a sure thing.

That is the trade-off the NHL chose: reward struggling teams enough to keep the draft fair, but not so much that finishing last is a golden ticket. The worst team still lands first overall less than one year in five.

How this compares across leagues

The NHL’s setup sits between two extremes. It is weighted toward the bottom like the NBA’s lottery but decides fewer picks by chance, and it is far more chance-driven than baseball’s newer system. If you want to see how another sport tackled the same tanking problem, our explainer on the MLB draft lottery odds walks through a format that lets all non-playoff teams into a six-pick draw. And if you just want to see which franchises turned high picks into banners, our list of the teams with the most Stanley Cups by team shows how rarely a single lottery win alone builds a dynasty. Every percentage here reflects the current format; the league occasionally revisits the odds, so confirm the live weightings before draft season.