All of the attention — and tension — now shifts to the May 5th draft lottery, after the 2025-26 Maple Leafs suffered one final indignity of losing to James Reimer and the Ottawa Senators in game #82, capping a truly miserable season. There is a silver lining to the Maple Leafs finishing in 28th overall with 78 points (32-36-14).
Technically speaking, the lottery odds still favour the Leafs relinquishing their 2026 first-round pick to the Bruins, at 58.2% (44% chance of dropping to sixth, 14.2% of dropping to seventh). However, they’ve got a ~16% chance of claiming one of the top two picks — 8.5% and 8.6%, respectively — in the two-phase lottery draw for the first two picks. And they’ve got a 24.5% chance of keeping the pick at fifth overall.
| Pick | Leafs' Lottery Odds |
|---|---|
| 1st Overall | 8.5% |
| 2nd Overall | 8.6% |
| 3rd Overall | 0.3% |
| 4th Overall | - |
| 5th Overall | 24.5% |
| 6th Overall | 44% |
| 7th Overall | 14.2% |
For whatever it’s worth, last year’s lottery — in which the Islanders jumped from 10th to 1st, and Utah moved from 14th to fourth — was the first time in five years that a team (or in this case, two) outside of the top-five picks jumped into it, dating back to the New York Rangers’ lottery win in 2020. The odds of a team outside the top five jumping into the top five in three out of the four draws spanning the 2025 and 2026 lotteries sound quite low, if we’re leaning into the gambler’s fallacy.
[A reminder of the rules: A set of 14 ping pong balls is placed in a lottery machine, allowing for 1,001 combinations. Each team in the lottery is assigned a set of four random numbers. The worse a team’s record, the more combinations they are assigned (e.g., the Leafs have an 8.6 chance of winning the first lottery draw). The first draw of ping pong balls determines the first overall pick, with a team only able to move up a maximum of 10 spots. There is then a second draw to determine the second pick.]
In the end, this was the best-of-the-worst-case-scenarios once the Leafs’ season officially came off the rails after the Olympic break. A perennial playoff team that was in a playoff spot as of mid-January, the Leafs went a ridiculous 5-15-5 post-Olympics, which ranked dead last in the NHL, and they finished the year on a seven-game losing streak. Whether intentional or not, once the Leafs were out of it with 20 or so games left, they couldn’t have done a much better job of bottoming out to salvage their top-five-protected pick (keep in mind Brad Treliving did fight hard for top-10 protection!). It was really the only way to justify keeping head coach Craig Berube at the helm of a clearly tuned-out group of players right through to the end: It was their best shot at getting themselves into this position, with a real chance (~42%) of keeping their 2026 draft choice, which was dealt conditionally to the Bruins in Treliving’s much-maligned Brandon Carlo trade.
In the keep-their-pick lottery outcome, the Leafs would be forced to hand over their 2027 and 2028 first-rounders to the Flyers and Bruins. But the vision of a retool scenario with a 2026 top-five prospect added to the stable becomes that much more tenable as a short- to medium-term strategy for any incoming GM.
We’ll see how the lottery balls break in 20 days’ time.
