The 2026 NHL Draft Lottery has come and gone, and it went much like everything else in the 2025-26 season – as in, the Vancouver Canucks lost, and have moved down to the third overall pick in the 2026 Entry Draft. This was the statistically most likely outcome, and yet it’s also an incredibly disappointing one, for a number of reasons.

It effectively ends the dream of the Canucks drafting Gavin McKenna at first overall. That opportunity will now go to the Toronto Maple Leafs, who won the first lottery draw and saw their pick move up from fifth overall to first.

Popular convention holds that McKenna is the best overall prospect in this draft, followed closely by fellow winger Ivar Stenberg. All year long, most scouts have had McKenna and Stenberg at first and second overall in their draft class, and that isn’t going to change between now and June.

The Canucks, having just begun their long-awaited rebuild, are a talent-poor team. What they needed the most out of this draft was to select the very best player available, and winning at least one of the two lotteries would have made that a lot easier.

But while the McKenna dream is firmly dead, perhaps the dream of drafting Stenberg is not. That’s because the team that won the second lottery, the San Jose Sharks, are one of the teams least likely to draft Stenberg at second overall. And that’s why their lottery win may have been a bit of a blessing in disguise for the Canucks.

To be clear, outright winning either lottery would have been a lot better for the Canucks, and would have allowed them a lot more certainty in their offseason approach. But if winning the lottery wasn’t on the table, losing to San Jose might be the next best thing.

Here’s why: no other franchise in this league is as loaded with young forwards as the San Jose Sharks are. It’s not just about Macklin Celebrini, the 19-year-old phenom. It’s also about Will Smith, the fourth overall pick in 2023 and Celebrini’s running mate. It’s about the 20-year-old Igor Chernyshov, who just put up 19 points in 28 games as a North American rookie pro. It’s about Michael Misa, the second overall pick in 2025. It’s about William Eklund, the senior statesman of this crew at 23 and already the author of two 50-point seasons.

All five of those young forwards are locked in and more or less already established at the NHL level. That’s less true of Misa, but he just turned 19 himself, and that’s coming as soon as next year.

The point being that the Sharks have a good 5/6 of their future long-term top-six forwards already in place, and that’s not even getting into their slate of quality forward prospects, including names like Filip Bystedt and Quentin Musty.

It’s already almost at the point where the Sharks will start trading off excess forward assets to fill other holes on their roster, primarily on the blueline. And that could very well impact their decisions at the 2026 Entry Draft podium.

The Sharks don’t really need another forward of Stenberg’s quality. Sure, they would take him for free and make good use out of him, but perhaps not at the cost of passing up on something they do truly need, and that’s high-quality young defenders, of which there are many in the 2026 Draft Class.

On the backend, the Sharks have the 19-year-old LD Sam Dickinson, who seems destined for a top-four career, and the 24-year-old Shakir Mukhamadullin, the player ultimately picked with the first pick the Canucks traded for JT Miller back in the day, and who is still finding his way in the league.

Beyond those two, the Sharks have a collection of aging and relatively ineffective veterans who are not part of their long-term plans, including Dmitry Orlov, Nick Leddy, John Klingberg, Mario Ferraro, and Vinny Desharnais.

The Sharks have a couple of solid D prospects like Leo Sahlin Wallenius and Haoxi Wang, but nothing blue-chip and nothing approaching the wealth of talent they’ve got up front.

The timeline matters here because it’s already begun. The forwards like Celebrini, Smith, and Misa are already in the NHL, already developing toward their prime years, and already starting to earn larger paycheques. If the Sharks are going to turn all this potential into a genuine contender, they need to start building up their blueline, and soon. That’s especially true given that defenders often take longer to develop than forwards.

All of which leads back to what is starting to feel like the likelihood that the Sharks skip on Stenberg at the 2026 Entry Draft, and instead choose their top-ranked D. They’d have plenty of names and styles to choose from, including RDs Keaton Verhoeff and Chase Reid, LDs Carson Carels and Alberts Smits, and perhaps a couple of other names. All of Verhoeff, Reid, Carels, and Smits have been ranked at third overall at various points by various agencies, and a couple of them have occasionally surpassed Stenberg in the eyes of some scouts.

The opportunity to add, say, a hulking future top-pairing RD in Verhoeff has to be more appealing to San Jose than another scoring forward in Stenberg, unless they truly see the skill discrepancy as too large to ignore.

It is said that, in most circumstances, teams should draft the best player available, and that this is more true the higher one sits in the draft. But the San Jose Sharks’ situation is not most circumstances. They’re already mostly on the other side of their rebuild, and now they’ve been made incredibly fortunate with a lottery win that boosted them seven spots and can now hand them a franchise defender practically out of nowhere.

The Sharks are one of the rare teams that can truly afford not to take the best player available. The smart money is on them taking a D, and that means that Ivar Stenberg should still be sitting there when the Canucks make their pick at third overall.

Thus, if the Canucks truly do prefer Stenberg to any of the D or to a centre like Caleb Malhotra, then San Jose winning the lottery was the best non-winning outcome for them. It’s not too hard to look at the other rosters in the running, like Toronto’s. Chicago’s, New York’s, Calgary’s, or Seattle’s, and see that each of them would undoubtedly draft BPA, and would almost certainly select Stenberg at second overall.

But not the San Jose Sharks. In losing a lottery to them, the Canucks might just walk away with their preferred pick, anyway. And it’s nice to get any sort of win out of a lottery process that the Canucks have now lost for the seventh time in franchise history.