No lottery luck

So, for the third year in a row, the Edmonton Oilers own the 1st overall pick in the NHL Entry Draft after winning the draft lottery last night. That leaves the Sabres first pick at 12th overall and the slot of the Nashville 1st rounder to be determined by how far the Predators advance in the playoffs. The current round of mock drafts have the Sabres picking in the 26th slot with that pick.

While plenty of people are dreaming of trade up scenarios, know that no team has trade out of the top 5 picks and out of the top 10 since the lockout. In fact, there has only been one team that traded down and out of the top 5 picks since the lockout. And that trade had the Nashville Predators only trading back two spots from 5th to 7th in 2008.

So while I'd love to see the Sabres trade up and get a center like Alex Galchenyuk or Mikhail Grigorenko, I don't see that happening.

The next tier of center prospects that the Sabres are more likely to have a shot at are Radek Faksa, Brendan Gaunce, and Colton Sissons.

If the Sabres look to Europe, Tomas Hertl is a guy that the Sabres might be looking at for help up the middle.

Although, it will be interesting to see if the Sabres do focus on the center position early or not. 8 of the top 12 North American skaters in the NHL Central Scouting's final rankings are defensemen. The European rankings are more even where the top 18 skaters are split evenly amongst forwards and defensemen.

The other question becomes if/when do the Sabres take a goalie. This draft has a couple of goalies with some late-first round chatter in Malcolm Subban (the younger brother of Montreal Canadiens D PK Subban) and Andrei Vasilevski who backstopped Russia to World Jr Championship Silver earlier this year.

Personally, Gaunce and Faksa are the two guys that I'm starting to hope for at 12.......