With the ninth-best lottery pick, the Flames are hoping luck will be on their side

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When recent history has the ninth-best odds in the NHL draft lottery, you're probably not moving much.

But what's life without a little hope, right?

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The Calgary Flames have a five percent chance of landing the first overall pick in Tuesday's draft lottery, with the eight teams that finished below them in the NHL standings having increasingly better odds.

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Now five percent is not much. But that's nothing, either, and it means Flames fans will go to sleep Monday night hoping for a little luck from the hockey gods to see their team come out with the consensus No. 1 overall pick, Maclin Celebrini. The project will go down in Las Vegas at the end of June.

And if it doesn't? And Flames director of amateur scouting Todd Button spoke about his optimism about the talent the team could select in the draft in March.

“I'll be honest with you, at the beginning of the year I was worried about how deep the draft was,” Button admitted. “But as always, every year there are guys that you don't know about or that develop a little bit later.”

If the Flames stay at the No. 9 pick, there are sure to be solid prospects. We'd be remiss if we didn't mention Tij Iginla here, as there will be plenty of excitement about bringing the son of Yarom into the organization if he's available at the end of June after a season with the Kelowna Rockets.

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But he's far from the only member of the 2024 draft class whose ceiling is higher and more interesting than projected, and unless they move up, the Flames won't know who they'll get until draft night. first or second choice when lottery balls are drawn on Tuesday evening (4:30 p.m.).

That's something GM Craig Conroy tried to emphasize a few weeks ago when he gave his end-of-season media availability speech.

“I think it's going to be interesting at nine,” Conroy said. “Teams pick the way they want to go before us, and then you see how the first three or four picks go and you have an idea. You say, “Well, I think it's going to be this player or that player.” Our list is not set in stone yet, we will have another meeting soon and it will be battles till the end.

“It's a fun process, it's a fun time of year, and the project is one of my favorite parts of this job.”

It's worth noting that the teams with the ninth-best odds in the last three lottery drafts have stayed right there and won the No. 9 overall pick.

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It doesn't say much about their plans for this year or anything else, but the Flames have been called the No. 9 twice in their entire history.

Those picks included Dion Phaneuf, who played 1,048 NHL games in 2003, and Brent Krahn, who played just one NHL game in 2000.

Is there a lesson there? Indeed, regardless of the outcome of Tuesday night's draft lottery, the Flames' rookie scouting department should be at its best.

“All we have to do is call, right now we're right here,” Conroy said. “Everything we're doing, we've got to pick guys that we really like, and that's what I said, if it's your first pick or your last pick in the sixth round this year, we want to make sure that every pick is important, we put a jersey on a guy that we think is going to be a Calgary Flame. will come.”

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