San Jose Sharks win 2024 NHL Draft Lottery and the first-overall pick in this year's draft
The San Jose Sharks have won the 2024 NHL Draft Lottery and the first-overall pick in this year's draft at The Sphere in Las Vegas, Nevada. Macklin Celebrini, you are – or rather, will be – a San Jose Shark.
The Sharks entered the process with the best odds of winning the first-overall pick – 18.5 percent, according to Tankathon – with an NHL-worst 19-54-9 record last season. Those odds proved more than good enough, as the board fell without really any suspense at all. The worst team won the draft lottery for first overall, and the league's second-worst team, the Chicago Blackhawks, won the lottery for second-overall.
It's the first time since 2010 that the draft board was unchanged by the results of the lottery.
This is how the first 16 picks of the 2024 NHL Draft will shake out:
- San Jose Sharks
- Chicago Blackhawks
- Anaheim Ducks
- Columbus Blue Jackets
- Montréal Canadiens
- Utah
- Ottawa Senators
- Seattle Kraken
- Calgary Flames
- New Jersey Devils
- Buffalo Sabres
- Philadelphia Flyers
- Minnesota Wild
- San Jose Sharks (from the Pittsburgh Penguins)
- Detroit Red Wings
- St. Louis Blues
If anything, the closest we came to any real suspense was when ESPN personality John Buccigross accidentally tweeted out a photo of the draft lottery board from a rehearsal only a few hours before the broadcaster. That board had the Sharks picking first overall, but Utah moved up into second.
Well deleting the tweet won’t cause anymore discussion… pic.twitter.com/twyJOcRuQJ
— Sean Shapiro (@seanshapiro) May 7, 2024
Of course, as tonight's events showed, that board was indeed the result of a rehearsal.
For the Sharks, today's news is a franchise-altering stroke of good luck that could finally set them on a course to emerge from the malaise of the last half-decade, a run that has seen them miss the playoffs in five straight seasons without many franchise-calibre players to show for it.
Today, that changed. Because in Celebrini, the Sharks will finally have a bona-fied, undeniable franchise player around whom they can build a contender again. There's still a lot of work in front of them and no guarantees that they'll get there, but landing Celebrini gives them a path to relevance again, and that's about all you can ask for.
And, of course, Celebrini has family ties to the area that just makes this an all-around great story. Macklin's father, Rick Celebrini, is the director of sports medicine and performance for the Golden State Warriors. He may have been born in Vancouver, but he's spent much of his life in the Bay Area because of his father, even playing for the San Jose Jr. Sharks at one point.
This one just seems right.
