The pursuit of a championship in professional sports often comes down to timelines. Executives routinely have to answer the question if their team is genuinely ready to contend for a championship, and if they’ve built a roster with players in their prime years to secure the trophy. After a decade of building a team designed to win a Stanley Cup, the Toronto Maple Leafs missed the playoffs, looking slower, less agile, and more susceptible to defensive breakdowns than ever before in the Auston Matthews era. And it’s worth considering that the Maple Leafs winning the 2016 NHL Draft Lottery may changed the course of the franchise, taking the team out of a moribund era, into a decade where it appeared the Stanley Cup was on the horizon.

If the Maple Leafs win the draft lottery for the second time in a decade, it would afford Mats Sundin and John Chayka some flexibility in pursuing the new direction for the franchise. Matthews and William Nylander are no longer emerging talents, they’re firmly in the prime of their careers, and in the case of the captain, some would argue that he’s started his age-related decline. If the Maple Leafs win the right to select Penn State forward Gavin McKenna with the first overall pick, it allows Sundin and Chayka to consider the previously unthinkable option: trading one of Matthews or Nylander for an arsenal of first-round picks, top prospects and emerging under-25 talents.

Matthew Knies and Easton Cowan are Toronto’s lone under-25 pillars, while top prospect Ben Danford projects to be a stay-at-home, reliable defender with limited offensive upside at the NHL level. If the Maple Leafs are to compete with the upstart Buffalo Sabres and Montreal Canadiens for the foreseeable future, they have to devise a way to get younger and quicker. Winning the lottery accelerates this goal tenfold. Toronto doesn’t have any real future assets beyond Danford and a 2027 top-10 protected pick from the Colorado Avalanche, and Tuesday presents a pathway back into the playoffs.

There’s certainly a level of mutual appreciation between Sundin and Matthews, and to be clear, no one is necessarily forcing Toronto’s captain out of two, with two years remaining on his existing contract. Toronto would be wise to consider that it was burned during the Mitch Marner saga, and if it becomes clear both parties cannot work out a long-term deal, recouping some value for Matthews has to be a top priority. In this sense, this perhaps looks too far into the future and as Matthews aptly told us on end-of-year media day, none of us have a crystal ball.

A group led by Matthews, Nylander, Knies and Morgan Rielly no longer seems capable of genuinely contesting for a Stanley Cup. Winning the lottery would afford the Maple Leafs a real chance to start anew, and provide Sundin and Chayka with the framework to move on from the veteran core that defined this past decade, a promising era full of regular season success that was never met in the playoffs. Here’s to hoping the balls fall in the Leafs’ favour, for all parties involved in the ecosystem.

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