With yet another St. Louis Blues win, and another overtime loss for the Minnesota Wild, the Vancouver Canucks’ already-slight chance of making the playoffs just got even narrower.

They’re not mathematically eliminated quite yet. Just eliminated in the hearts and minds of most supporters.

All but the most aggressively optimistic have surely given up on the postseason by now.

And whenever the playoffs fall out of reach, that old familiar topic of ‘tanking’ comes out to play. Which, of course, makes sense. Fans want to get something out of an entire season’s worth of time and emotional investment, and if that something isn’t some postseason action, it should at least be a decent draft pick.

As of now, the Canucks maintain possession of their own first round pick in the 2025 NHL Entry Draft. That has naturally led to some folks suggesting they’d like to see the Canucks lose every game from here on out, so as to maximize the chances of that pick being a good one. Or, at the very least, some have expressed worries that the Canucks will do what they normally do, and go on a run of wins after being functionally eliminated, so as to lower their own draft choice.

But this late in the game, the potential impact of tanking is a little overrated. And that’s largely because, although the draft lottery technically includes all 16 teams that do not make the playoffs, the odds are still heavily in favour of those teams in the bottom ten of the standings – a landing spot that is already realistically out of reach for Vancouver.

It’s important to remember here that teams can only ever move up a maximum of ten spots by winning the draft lottery, which means that a team has to finish in the bottom-11 to even receive a chance at drafting first overall. And it’s a mighty slim chance, at that, for those teams not even further down in the cellar.

As always, the website Tankathon is by far the best resource at understanding the real odds involved in the draft lottery.

Here, we can see that the Canucks – with the 15^th-worst point-percentage in the NHL as of this writing – currently only have a 0.5% chance, or 1-in-200, of winning the lottery. And even if they were to win it from this spot in the standings, all they’d do is move up to fifth overall. They’ve got a literally 0% chance at 1OA as of right now.

(And wouldn’t it be the most Canucks thing ever for them to finally win the draft lottery in a year where they can’t claim the first pick? One shudders at the possibility.)

It isn’t until we get down to the Detroit Red Wings, with the 11^th-worst point-percentage, that we find a team with a real shot at 1OA. And even then, it’s only a 3% shot. That’s not much to hang any hopes upon, but it’s still infinitely more hope than the Canucks currently have of drafting at the top of the class in 2025.

As of Friday morning, the Red Wings are six points behind the Canucks in the standings. Is it possible for the Wings to make up that six-point gap over their final eight games, thus moving them above the Canucks in the standings, and thus moving the Canucks ahead of the Red Wings in the draft lottery? It’s possible, sure. But it’s not very likely.

We’d point out that seven points is the gap between the Canucks and a playoff spot right now, and that that feels like an enormous gap to overcome. The same is true in the other direction. And we’d also have to point out that the Canucks wouldn’t just need to slip below the Red Wings in the standings to get into the bottom-11, but every other team currently between them and the bottom-11 – a list that for now contains the Rangers, the Utah HC, and the Blue Jackets.

And, again, that’s only to receive a 3% chance at winning the lottery and drafting first overall. To get better odds, they’d have to fall impossibly far in the standings.

So, as tempting as it might be to bust out the ol’ “Team Tank” t-shirts as the Canucks close out 2024/25, it’s all a little bit late for that line of thinking. At this point, losing more games is not going to impact their draft odds to any real extent that is worth worrying about. In fact, one might argue that the other, more negative potential impacts of continuing to lose out – like the potential impact upon team morale – are probably bigger factors to consider than any changes in lottery position.

In other words, you can still cheer for the Canucks to win, even for these last seven games. It’s not going to make much of a difference one way or another.