Hockey

Where Detroit Red Wings rank with 2 games left

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Another Detroit Red Wings season is wrapping up without so much as a whiff of ending their six-year playoff drought, and change seems inevitable.

Jeff Blashill, Wings coach for the past seven seasons, might be at the end of the road with the franchise, with our Helene St. James writing Saturday was likely his final home game on the bench. General manager Steve Yzerman wraps up his third year on the job and has seen progress — they were 22-21-6 in mid-February — become stagnation with too many poor efforts and blowout defeats — they’re 9-18-4 since Feb. 14. More change is on the horizon.

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And yet the conclusion of the regular season — 30 of the 32 teams finish Friday — brings the annual gift that is the NHL draft lottery, set for May 10 (6:30 p.m., ESPN). The lottery consists of the 16 teams to miss the playoffs.

The 2022 NHL entry draft is scheduled for July 7-8 in Montreal, with forward Shane Wright of the Ontario Hockey League’s Kingston Frontenacs as the consensus No. 1 pick.

This year’s lottery sees the affect of changes ratified by the league a year ago: There are only two drawings; teams only allowed to leap 10 spots. Then 14 teams not selected in the lottery will be assigned the remaining draft selections, among 1 through 16 in the first round, in inverse order of regular-season points.

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The Red Wings, currently eighth in the lottery standings, have two games remaining — at Toronto on Tuesday and at New Jersey on Friday — and are guaranteed to be in the top 11 entering the lottery, so the “move up” rule won’t affect their ability to make a jump into the top two, should the ping pong balls fall their way.

If the Wings stay at No. 8 in the standings through the final week here, they’d enter the lottery with 12.4% odds to pick in the top two and…

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Source : yahoo

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