Ultimately, you have to be both lucky and the opposite of good to contend for the first overall pick in the NHL draft lottery. The Edmonton Oilers have neatly met the criteria for both in recent years. Four times in the past six years, they've had the first overall pick and two other times, they've been at No. 3 and No. 7.
They've mined a wealth of young talent in that time, but for all the promising pieces they've put into place already – from Taylor Hall and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins to Jordan Eberle and Nail Yakupov – Saturday's unexpected win in the 2015 NHL draft lottery will produce the most important one of all, Connor McDavid, a potential franchise player in the mould of Sidney Crosby.
McDavid will join a team that also has in its developmental pipeline Leon Draisaitl, a hard-edged two-way player, chosen third overall in 2014. Draisaitl started the year in the NHL and showed flashes of his vast potential before the Oilers sent him back to junior. He should be NHL ready by next year and McDavid is expected to step right in as well.
Even in the era of new-age analytics, the old maxim of strength-down-the-middle remains the key to any rebuild and the Oilers now have massive depth and potential there.
In many ways, the presence of McDavid, Nugent-Hopkins and Draisaitl is reminiscent of the time in the mid-1990s when the Quebec Nordiques had at their disposal three future Hall of Famers – Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg and Mats Sundin, all of them under the age of 24 and brimming with potential.
Quebec's depth at centre was so great that they ultimately traded away Sundin to the Toronto Maple Leafs (for Wendel Clark) to fill in the experience gap.
Eventually, that team relocated to Colorado, won two Stanley Cups (in 1996 and 2001) and was a championship contender for close to a decade.
In the end, Colorado didn't become a legitimate threat until it also acquired a future Hall of Fame goaltender, Patrick Roy, from the Montreal Canadiens. Roy brought stability to the back end that permitted all that high-end glittery offensive talent to shine.
That second part of the Avalanche lesson should not be lost on the Oilers, either.
Apart from having a revolving-door policy behind the bench these past half dozen years, the Oilers have also tried (and failed) to find a stabilizing goaltender. This past season's candidates, Ben Scrivens and Viktor Fasth, who played all but 397 minutes for the team in net, finished at the bottom of the NHL goaltending standings, 30th overall.
The previous year's sextet of goalie options also finished 30th defensively.
What the Oilers need in the near term is a stable veteran stop-gap, someone along the lines of Jonas Hiller, who filled the void in goal for their provincial rivals, the Calgary Flames, after signing as a free agent last summer.
Oilers general manager Craig MacTavish called the lottery win "a game-changing moment" on a conference call from Switzerland, where he is scouting the world under-18 championships – and confirmed that there was "zero" chance he would trade the pick, no matter what might be offered.
The Oilers are moving into a new building in one year's time, which will help create some distance from the grim recent past – nine consecutive years out of the playoffs and counting.
Knowing the odds were stacked against his club, MacTavish refused to get his hopes too high, until deputy commissioner Bill Daly – eliminating candidates team by team – finally smiled and announced, "We have a winner."
"Going forward, I can stand up there and talk about optimism and talk about a bright future, but everyone can share in that wish now, with us winning the lottery," MacTavish said.
True enough. Nothing will help right the sins of the past more than the giddy hope a potential franchise player can provide. But hockey is and always will be a team game. Success requires depth at every position and generally rewards teams that are greater than the sums of their individual parts.
The Oilers need a goaltending upgrade, better personnel on the blueline and an improved commitment to defensive hockey to move up the NHL ladder.
Saturday's draft lottery win is a great starting point. It provided their franchise with a defining 'wow' moment and a genuine opportunity to fast track the rebuild within the rebuild.
This time, they'd better get it right.