Better luck next year: Lottery luck finds the San Jose Sharks again, but that will not be enough

This is their third top-three pick in four years. It might eventually lead to greatness. It still might take a long time.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the San Jose Sharks.

When it comes to a season in the middle of a massive rebuild it is really hard to imagine one going better than the 2025-26 campaign did for the San Jose Sharks.

While they missed the playoffs for the seventh year in a row, they still took a pretty significant step forward from where they had been.

They were competitive. They remained in the playoff race for the entire season and watched as 19-year-old Macklin Celebrini continued to grow into one of the best players in the game. They improved by 19 wins and 34 points in the standings from where they were a year ago, missing the playoffs by just four points.

Given that this team won 39 games over the previous two seasons combined, I am confident in saying that Sharks fans and the Sharks organization are probably happy with that progress.

Do you know what else probably makes them really happy?

Even with all of that improvement on the ice, and even with that improvement in the standings, they still had some serious luck in the NHL Draft Lottery, winning the second drawing and jumping all the way from the No. 9 overall pick to the No. 2 overall pick.

That is going to give them the opportunity to potentially land another superstar-level player to go along with recent top-three picks Celebrini and Michael Misa (not to mention recent No. 4 overall pick Will Smith).

It is the third year in a row they will be picking in the top-three, with all of them being within the top-two.

Given the nature of the current draft lottery and how much the odds are stacked against even the worst teams, it is a potentially franchise-changing stretch of luck.

But what will it mean for the short-term and long-term future? How quickly can this potentially turn into serious success? Recent history suggests it could happen. It might happen. But it also might take a really long time, even if it does happen. Especially if they do not complement those high picks with more immediate help.

The Sharks are going to be the seventh different franchise in the salary cap era (starting with the 2005-06 season) to have at least three top-three picks within a five-year window.

For now, I am only counting picks made in the salary cap era (starting with the 2005 NHL Draft). It is also, again, only top-three picks because those are generally the most impactful. There are still a significant number of star-level players taken at No. 4, No. 5, and in the top-10, but even then the odds are dramatically lower than they are in the top-three in any random year. The top-three, and ideally the top-two, are what people talk about when they talk about tanking or full-scale rebuilds.

First, a quick graphic to show all of those teams and what they did in the years following the last top-three pick in that given stretch.

The jury is obviously still out on a few of them.

Let’s quickly break it down team-by-team:

• Anaheim Ducks: The Ducks selected Mason McTavish (No. 3, 2021), Leo Carlsson (No. 2, 2023) and Beckett Sennecke (No. 3, 2024) and after missing the playoffs in 2024-25, came back this season and are currently in the second-round and potentially still going. McTavish has not really taken a huge leap yet in his development, but Carlsson and Sennecke both look like emerging stars and have played a big role in their success this season. The trade addition of Cutter Gauthier is also a massive add to the core. They are as exciting as any young team in the league offensively, but still have a ways to go with their defensive game. Outlook is promising, but I am not sure they are a Stanley Cup team right now. I will be impressed if they beat Vegas.

• Buffalo Sabres: The Sabres picked Sam Reinhart (No. 2, 2014), Jack Eichel (No. 2, 2015) and Rasmus Dahlin (No. 1, 2018) and then also had another No. 1 overall pick join the group in 2021 when Owen Power went No. 1 overall. So they really have two different five-year stretches here with three top-three picks. But as you can see in the table above … none of this produced immediate results. Reinhart and Eichel were eventually traded without playing a single playoff game in Buffalo and eventually winning Stanley Cups in Vegas (Eichel) and Florida (Reinhart). Even after the Power selection at No. 1 it took them another five years just to make the playoffs. It also took a lot of trades and some luck to get there. That playoff run is still ongoing against the Montreal Canadiens in the second-round. It is a fun team. Lot of talent. But there are also some red flags in their process this season that do bring in to question how repeatable this is next season. The jury is still out here.

• Chicago Blackhawks: The Blackhawks had three consecutive top-three picks in 2023, 2024 and 2025 selecting Connor Bedard, Artyom Levshunov and Anton Frondell. Another franchise that is still writing its story. Bedard is a star offensively. Levshunov is still very much a work in progress, but I do think there is some reason to question if they would have been better off with Ivan Demidov. If nothing else, Levshunov’s development is going to be fascinating to watch in comparison to Demidov’s. Frondell had a promising debut this season, but has only played in 12 games. There is obviously some great young talent here, but in three years with Bedard the Blackhawks have improved by just three wins from the year they actively tanked to get Bedard. This team is still A LONG WAY from contention.

• Colorado Avalanche: The Avalanche had three top-three picks between 2009 and 2013, selecting Matt Duchene, Gabriel Landeskog and Nathan MacKinnon. Colorado also had a pair of No. 4 overall picks shortly after this stretch, landing Cale Makar and Bowen Byram. The Byram pick came as part of a trade that involved Duchene going to the Ottawa Senators. Landeskog and MacKinnon became cornerstone players (along with Makar and another top-12 pick in Mikko Rantanen) and eventually led to a sustained run of success and a championship. It did, however, take nine years after the MacKinnon pick for that championship to land, and a significant portion of that championship-winning team was pieced together through trades and free agency. Only six players on that playoff roster were actually drafted by the Avalanche.

• Edmonton Oilers: Remember that stretch where the Oilers were picking No. 1 overall every year? In the stretch here they took Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Nail Yakupov No. 1 overall in consecutive years, and then had a top-3 pick that resulted in Leon Draisaitl. One year later (which falls out of the initial five-year window that began with the Hall pick) they got another No. 1 overall pick in Connor McDavid. Insane lottery luck. Most of those picks hit. And it still took them eight years after the Draisaitl pick in 2014 (and seven years after the McDavid pick) to even reach the Western Conference Finals. They did play in two Stanley Cup Finals (a decade after the Draisaitl pick and nine years after the McDavid pick), but after the way this season went they seem to be in real danger of not getting a championship from the McDavid-Draisaitl era. They took a huge step backwards and seem further away from a championship than they were a couple of years ago.

• Florida Panthers: The Panthers had a five-year run between 2010 and 2014 where they landed in the top-three four times, resulting in the selections of Erik Gudbranson, Jonathan Huberdeau, Aleksander Barkov and Aaron Ekblad. Lot of key pieces there. While Gudbranson turned out to be “just a guy,” Ekblad, Barkov and Huberdeau turned into cornerstone players. Barkov and Ekblad remained with the team to eventually be a part of the two Stanley Cup winning teams, while Huberdeau was traded for Matthew Tkachuk. But just as it was with Colorado, it took nearly a decade for those top draft picks to win a championship. It also required an extremely aggressive front office that was willing to make several blockbuster trades and smart signings along the way. The two Stanley Cup winning teams were primarily built through trades and free agency. Barkov, Ekblad, Anton Lundell and Mackie Samoskevich were the only players actually drafted by the Panthers to play in playoff games on those Stanley Cup winning teams.

So that is where we are in recent history with teams that have picked this consistently at the top of the draft.

It’s a fascinating thing to look at because having one or two elite talents is pretty much a requirement to win a championship. A lot of times the easiest way to get that sort of talent is at the top of the draft.

Most Stanley Cup winning teams in the salary cap era have a least one top-three pick somewhere on the roster.

There are exceptions.

The 2007 Ducks, 2008 Red Wings, 2019 Blues and 2023 Golden Knights did not have a single top-three pick on their roster that they selected. A lot of them had players that were selected at the top of the draft, but were selected by other teams that they had to trade for (Chris Pronger in Anaheim; Eichel in Vegas).

Of the teams still playing in the second round this season, Minnesota does not have a single top-three pick that it made on its roster. Neither does Vegas (again). Montreal has one. Carolina has one (which it landed in a season where it started the lottery 11th overall and had the lottery balls go its way). Buffalo has Dahlin and Power, but as we highlighted above … it took some time and a lot more losing to get here.

Getting those high picks can help. It is not a necessity, but it helps. The counter to that is the teams that are perpetually picking at the top of the draft, multiple times, over an extend period of time are facing a really long road back. Even if they get the picks right. You have to really gut your team down to the bottom in order to be that bad for that many years. You are not fixing that quickly. And you still need to do a lot more than just get those picks.

The Sharks are in a good position, and this pick only helps that cause. But they absolutely can not just sit back and be content with it and happily wait for it to all come together. If they want to win, and win sooner than later, they are still going to need to be aggressive outside of these lottery picks to get proven NHL talent (ideally in its prime) that can help the young core.

They can, and should, start that this offseason.

Let’s get into that a little more, as well as a deeper look at the Sharks season, what went right and what went wrong.