All of the long nights, all of the losing, all of the pain.
All of it worth it for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The rebuild is getting a foundational piece after the lottery balls bounced in favour of an organization that has been wandering around in the wilderness for the better part of a decade. Depending on your age, you might say it’s been a whole lot longer than that.
The Leafs won the No. 1 pick in Saturday’s draft lottery and will have to choose between centre Auston Matthews and hard-charging winger Patrik Laine at June’s entry draft.
That it came after a season where they finished 30th overall with a 29-42-11 record still required a stroke of luck.
The NHL altered the rules this year to lessen the incentive to finish low in the standings, and the timing wasn’t particularly good for a Leafs organization that finally went all-in on a rebuild. They cleared long-term cap space by trading Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf, and turned a number of other veteran players into draft picks or futures.
As a result, a patchwork lineup endured more losing than head coach Mike Babcock had been through at any other point in his NHL career.
“Drafting for our organization is very, very important,” Babcock said late in the season. “We’ve taken it on the chin all year to be set up.”
Team president Brendan Shanahan has vowed to oversee a patient roster reconstruction, but he had been hoping for a little good fortune as well. It arrived in a sealed-off room about 30 paces from the “Hockey Night in Canada” studio in downtown Toronto.
Getting an opportunity to pick first won’t be a magic cure-all for a last-place team, but it provides a significant step in the right direction. Matthews may not be billed as a generational talent like Connor McDavid, who went No. 1 to Edmonton last spring, but he’s a high-end option at a position where the Leafs haven’t had one since Mats Sundin.
It seemed somewhat fitting that the last ball pulled from the machine to grant the Leafs the selection was No. 13 – the sweater number the long-time captain wore with distinction for more than a decade.
The draft lottery brought about some anxious moments for those in Toronto’s executive suite because the team had a 47.5 per cent chance of not winning any of the top three picks and falling to fourth. That would have been a bitter pill at the end of a long season.
This is only the seventh time in the last 22 years that the 30th-place team won the lottery itself.
The Leafs are also intimately familiar with how much chance is involved in the process given that they had the best odds of landing McDavid heading to the last ball a year ago. When that scenario arrived on Saturday night, Edmonton, Columbus and Winnipeg all owned two potential winning numbers while the Leafs were one of five teams holding one.
Their luck has changed.
It continued a wave of positive momentum away from the rink that started when Babcock choose the Leafs among several potential landing spots last May. Even with a weakened lineup, he oversaw significant improvements to their puck possession game and created a belief within the front office that they are close to returning to respectability.
“I would say that collectively, we’re ahead of where we thought we might be,” Shanahan said earlier this month.
Pencilling either Matthews or Laine into a depth chart that already includes William Nylander, Mitch Marner and numerous other enticing prospects should certainly create more hope for the league’s longest-suffering fanbase.
The Leafs own 11 draft picks other than the No. 1 overall selection this year, including Pittsburgh’s first-rounder, so the youth movement is on in a major way. And their American Hockey League affiliate is coming off a season where it finished atop the standings and is currently chasing the Calder Cup.
Eventually, perhaps, the Leafs might work their way back into the conversation for the Stanley Cup.
Simply qualifying for the playoffs would represent a massive improvement because the only time that’s happened since 2004 was following the lockout-shortened 2013 season.
It is still going to take some time for the pieces to come together at Air Canada Centre, but the Leafs are undeniably in a better spot tonight than they were this morning. Matthews and Laine both spent this season playing professionally – in Switzerland and Finland, respectively – and fared extremely well as teenagers battling grown men.
You can bet they’ll both be ready to make the NHL jump immediately.
One of them is going to have an opportunity to pull on a Maple Leafs sweater at an extremely positive time for the organization. The Leafs are gearing up to celebrate their centennial season in 2016-17 and the team can finally see a future brighter than its recent past.