Maple Leafs now guaranteed a good draft pick: Likely first, fourth or fifth

So the Toronto Maple Leafs are winning again.

On Sunday, they played spoiler for the second time in nine days, taking an Ottawa Senators team desperate for points to a shootout and coming away with the two points when Peter Holland beat The Hamburglar for the winner.

That improved the long-since-eliminated Leafs to 3-1-1 in their last five games, their first stretch with seven-plus points in five games since an odd 10-1-1 hot streak that ended in mid-December.

They're hot, just in time to ruin their draft pick.

Except that time has long since passed.

Skittish Leafs fans have been worried about this sort of run for a while. They remember all-too well how J-S Aubin went 9-0-2 at the tail end of 2006 to drop their draft pick from eighth overall to 13th. (They took Jiri Tlusty and missed out on Kyle Okposo and Bryan Little, among others.)

They also remember 2009, when former GM Brian Burke claimed Martin Gerber on waivers in early March and Boyd Devereaux scored a hat trick in the final game of the season.

Six points out of a top five pick and fading when they claimed Gerber (with 11 wins in their previous 31 games), the Leafs finished the year 9-9-0 and narrowly missed being able to draft Matt Duchene or Oliver Ekman-Larsson.

(Their eventual pick, Nazem Kadri, was nevertheless a good one at seventh.)

Frivolous late-season runs, in other words, have been what the Leafs do.

This year is different, though: They're too late. At this point, even with their recent wins, Toronto can't climb any higher than fifth last in the NHL, a spot that would necessitate they somehow pass the Carolina Hurricanes, who have two games in hand, including one against bottom-feeding Buffalo.

Sportsclubstats.com gives the Leafs only a 6-per-cent chance of passing Carolina and a 94-per-cent chance of remaining in fourth last in the NHL.

Which is a very good spot to be in in what is expected to be one of the best NHL drafts in the last dozen years.

Below is a fuller breakdown of the Leafs probability of winding up with various draft picks, with the incorporation the draft lottery scenarios. Their most likely position for the draft is fifth overall (46 per cent), closely followed by fourth (42 per cent), with a nearly 10-per-cent shot at drafting first overall and getting Connor McDavid.

The worst pick the Leafs can wind up with is sixth, which would mean not only passing Carolina but having a team with a better record winning the lottery.

It's an extreme long shot, but if you're a believer in this team being cursed, that's as bad as it can get.