oooo boy this draft is gonna get weird. Mainly because the bottom playoff teams IRL have almost identical points (71 and 72, chicago and montreal). So you can order the teams with "fewer than 71" points from both conferences, and have the lottery normally.
Not so in puck! We are the 23rd best team, typically good for 9th best lottery odds. BUT! of the 8 teams worse than us, 3 of them are in the qualifying round of the playoffs, and therefore not lottery teams. Does that mean that we get the 6th best lottery odds? And then, if the teams that are worse than us don't win the lottery, and don't advance past the playoffs, do they get a better draft pick than us? That feels wrong! They got playoff games (in a year where, literally anything could happen, anybody could win, and all our strategy was for naught) and we didn't. But also, do we get a better draft pick than a team that objectively did worse than us in the regular season? That also feels wrong!
There's no good answers, and I'm trying not to make a case, despite having a vested interest, but I feel like this situation, between art, burrows, matthews and me/sygvard is gonna get at least a little weird and it will be impossible to please everybody.