Thanks to one of the most unique point systems in professional sports, at least one Vancouver hockey team will be drafting first overall in their upcoming draft.

The Vancouver Goldeneyes were eliminated from playoff contention in the PWHL just last week, which moved them into a new set of standings: the Gold Plan. Created by Adam Gold in 2012, the Gold Plan is a format that aims to discourage teams from tanking by rewarding clubs with a higher draft pick based on the points they earn after being eliminated.

After finishing the season with two wins, and thanks to a Montreal Victoire shootout victory over the Seattle Torrent, the Goldeneyes tied the Torrent in Gold Plan points with five apiece. But Vancouver’s two wins – one in regulation, one in overtime – gave them the tiebreaker over Seattle, which means the Goldeneyes will have the first overall pick in June’s draft, where they’ll certainly select generational defender and Olympic MVP Caroline Harvey.

The Canucks hope to join their women’s counterparts at the top of the NHL draft board this June, but their hopes rely on the results of next week’s draft lottery. Originally conceived in 1995, the draft lottery has gone through many iterations, from only allowing the top five teams to move into the top spot, to allowing all eliminated teams a shot, to today’s version: two lotteries, one for each of the top two picks, but only the bottom ten teams can move up to the first overall selection. For finishing last place, the Canucks have a 25.5% shot at first overall and the right to select Canadian winger Gavin McKenna.

The lowest the Canucks can draft is third overall, a good guarantee for a last-place team. If the current system’s goal is not to reward tanking teams, they’re accomplishing that, but it’s worth asking if that system could be fairer to genuinely struggling teams that could use the lift a generational talent would provide. In other words, what would happen if the NHL took a page out of the PWHL’s book and replaced the draft lottery with the Gold Plan?

Here’s how the Gold Plan works: when a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, they begin to accrue points in the Gold Plan standings by winning games or getting them to overtime. The team that earns the most points after being eliminated wins the first overall pick.

Since the NHL doesn’t use the PWHL’s 3-point system (they should, but that’s for a different article), we’re looking at the numbers with the NHL’s existing point system: two for a win, one for an overtime loss, zero for a regulation loss. Here’s how this past season would’ve shaken out:

Thanks mostly to the excess number of games they played after being eliminated, the Canucks would draft second overall, the second most likely outcome for where they’ll select in the real draft. Instead, the Rangers’ late-season surge would’ve given them first overall, while the injured but already stacked Panthers would get to pick third.

As strictly a tanking deterrent, this would clearly work. But it would also seemingly give franchises that already have a lot going for them a huge leg up on genuinely bad teams, creating a cycle in which a good team’s off year prevents worse rosters from getting the pieces to win. The Panthers sliding into the top three, one year removed from back-to-back Stanley Cups, would cause a firestorm of complaints from fans and team executives alike.

Part of why the system works in the PWHL is because of the number of teams competing and the shorter, 30-game length of the schedule. With just eight franchises, only four can be eliminated and accrue Gold Plan points, guaranteeing that the top picks will go to teams that need them most. With 16 teams eliminated every year in the NHL’s standings, and teams getting upwards of 10 games to pick up points, the odds are much higher that a franchise whose season was derailed by injuries can go on a late run and snag a top pick they don’t really need. As the PWHL adds more teams (as many as four more could be added to the league in the next couple of years), they will likely need to reevaluate and tweak this system.

But a lot of these scenarios are already possible under the NHL’s current draft lottery format. The Panthers still have a chance at winning first overall, albeit a much smaller 6% chance. So can the Winnipeg Jets, who won the President’s Trophy last year, and the Toronto Maple Leafs, who’ve been a mainstay in the playoffs for the last decade. The truth is, legitimate tanking (aka throwing the season for a high draft pick) is much less prevalent than major leagues claim it to be. All these systems might be interesting, but they solve a problem that wasn’t a serious issue to begin with. The most balanced system between discouraging tanking and giving picks to the teams that need them was arguably the NHL’s original lottery format, where only the bottom five teams had a shot at the first overall pick.

The Canucks could very well become Vancouver’s second pro hockey team to win the first overall pick. We might get to see Gavin McKenna and Caroline Harvey pose for photos together in their respective draft jerseys around the city all summer long. But the Canucks will have to defy a lot of odds to make that real.