1970 NHL Draft Lottery: The Spin That Vancouver Has Never Forgotten

Published on February 16th, 2026 4:08 pm EST
Written By: Dave Manuel


Clarence Campbell, the president of the National Hockey League, couldn't read a wheel.

That's the short version. The long version is one of the strangest stories in the history of professional sports, and I'm genuinely surprised it doesn't get talked about more. I've been running sports websites for years and the first time I heard this story in full, my reaction was something along the lines of "there's no way that actually happened." It did.

June 1970. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. The NHL is holding its amateur draft, and two brand new expansion teams need to sort out who picks first. The Buffalo Sabres and the Vancouver Canucks are both entering the league for the 1970-71 season. Neither team has a single player on its roster. The draft is everything. And the first overall pick is a foregone conclusion: Gilbert Perreault, a centre with the Montreal Junior Canadiens, 121 points in 54 games, back-to-back Memorial Cup champion, the consensus best prospect in Canadian hockey by a wide margin. Scouts were calling him the next Jean Beliveau. Bobby Orr said watching Perreault play was disorienting because his head went one way, his legs went another, and the puck was doing something else entirely.

So how do you decide which expansion team gets to draft him?

Flip a coin. That's what the NBA did. That's what the NFL did. Simple, clean, impossible to screw up.

The NHL used a carnival wheel.

I need you to sit with that for a second. The National Hockey League, a professional sports organization, decided that the best way to determine the most consequential pick in its upcoming draft was to wheel out something that looked like it belonged next to a ring toss game at a county fair. Numbers 2 through 6 went to Vancouver. Numbers 8 through 12 went to Buffalo. The number 7 was neutral -- land on it and you re-spin. No 1. No 13. NHL President Clarence Campbell would personally spin the wheel at a media luncheon two days before the draft.

Campbell stepped up. Gave it a spin. The room went quiet. The wheel slowed, clicked, stopped.

"The number is one!"

Vancouver's table erupted. GM Bud Poile and his staff were out of their chairs, cheering. They'd won. Perreault was going to be a Canuck. The franchise had its centrepiece before it had ever played a game.

The celebration lasted a few seconds.

From the Buffalo side, somebody asked Campbell to take another look. Who exactly spoke up first is one of those details that's gotten fuzzy over 55 years. Some accounts say it was Punch Imlach, Buffalo's coach and GM, a grizzled four-time Cup winner who was not a man who sat quietly when he thought something was wrong. Other accounts credit Al Millar, a Sabres scout who used to be a backup goalie for the Canucks in the WHL. Doesn't really matter who said it. What matters is what Campbell found when he looked again.

The number wasn't 1. There was no 1 on the wheel.

It was 11. The arrow had been covering one of the ones. Campbell had misread his own contraption. Buffalo had won.

Poile sat down. The room went sideways. And the entire future of two NHL franchises flipped because a league president needed reading glasses.

OK, So Was It Rigged?

Now look. I'm not going to sit here and tell you definitively that the wheel was rigged. I don't have a smoking gun. Nobody does. There was no investigation, no formal complaint from Vancouver, no deathbed confession from a league official fifty years later.

But I will tell you this: if you were designing a scenario to fix a draft, you could not do much better than what the NHL set up in that room.

No independent oversight of the wheel. No third-party auditor. No video replay. The league president personally conducts the spin and personally reads the result. And he reads it wrong, which means at minimum we know the process was sloppy enough that a major error went undetected by the guy running it. If a random scout in the front row hadn't spoken up, Vancouver gets the pick. Think about that. The entire outcome hinged on one person in the audience paying closer attention than the president of the league.

Then there's the Imlach thing, and this is the detail that really gets me. Punch Imlach was given the choice between the high numbers and the low numbers on the wheel. He picked 8 through 12. His reason? The range included 11. His lucky number.

The wheel landed on 11.

Perreault wore number 11 in juniors. Kept it in Buffalo for his entire 17-year career. Said he kept it as a tribute to the wheel.

I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. Not that it happened -- coincidences happen -- but the idea that nobody in 1970 looked at that sequence of events and said "hold on a minute" is wild to me. Imlach picks the number range because it contains his lucky number, the wheel lands on exactly that number, and the franchise owned by the Knox brothers -- who had been passed over in the 1967 expansion and were widely believed to be owed a favour by the league -- walks away with the best player available. Everything just works out perfectly for the most well-connected ownership group in the room.

Maybe it was luck. Maybe Punch Imlach really did have a magic number. I don't know. But if this happened today, with cameras everywhere and social media ready to dissect every frame, the NHL would never hear the end of it.

And Then It Got Ridiculous

Here's where the story goes from funny-weird to genuinely consequential, because the wheel didn't just give Buffalo a good hockey player. It gave them an entire era.

Perreault scored in the Sabres' very first game. Won the Calder Trophy as the league's best rookie. Put up 38 goals in 78 games as a 19-year-old and broke a rookie scoring record that had stood since 1925. Immediate impact, no adjustment period, just instant dominance.

The next year, Buffalo drafted Rick Martin fifth overall. Left winger. Shot like a cannon. Lived and breathed scoring goals and did not care about much else on the ice.

Then in March 1972, the Sabres made a trade that looks almost criminal in hindsight. They sent Eddie Shack, a 35-year-old journeyman forward running on fumes, to Pittsburgh for Rene Robert, a right winger from Trois-Rivieres who was only 23 and had never really gotten a fair shot. Robert showed up in Buffalo and immediately clicked with Perreault and Martin like they'd been playing together their whole lives.

Three French-Canadian kids from Quebec. Perreault from Victoriaville, Martin from Verdun, Robert from Trois-Rivieres. Someone called them the French Connection after the movie that had come out the year before, and the name stuck permanently.

I could write an entire separate article about the French Connection and still not do them justice, but here's what you need to know: they were the most exciting forward line in hockey for the better part of a decade, and they were built on a spinning wheel and a lopsided trade. Perreault was the magician, the guy who could carry the puck end-to-end and make defenders look like they were standing in cement. The whole building stood up when he got the puck behind his own net because everyone knew what was about to happen. Martin was a pure scorer. Led the team in goals seemingly every year, ripped off 52-goal seasons, didn't pretend to be anything other than what he was. Robert was the one people underestimated. He did the dirty work. Fought for pucks in corners, backchecked, killed penalties. And still put up 40-goal campaigns while doing all of it.

738 goals between the three of them. 1,681 points in 1,536 games together. They made the playoffs nearly every season and took the Sabres to the 1975 Stanley Cup Finals -- the franchise's FIFTH year of existence. An expansion team in the Cup Final in five years. That doesn't happen.

They lost to the Flyers in six games, which is its own incredible story. Game 3 is known as the Fog Game and it might be the most absurd playoff game ever played. Buffalo's Memorial Auditorium had no air conditioning. It was 90 degrees outside. The temperature inside the building matched it. A thick fog rolled across the ice surface and nobody could see. They stopped play seven times to have players skate around waving towels trying to clear the air. A bat started flying around the rink. The Flyers' goalie couldn't track the puck through the mist. Rene Robert eventually scored in overtime to win it 5-4, and honestly, if you told me a ghost scored that goal through the fog, I might believe you.

They never won a Cup. The 1975 run was as close as Perreault ever got. He played all 17 of his seasons in Buffalo -- never left, never asked to leave -- and retired in 1986 holding every meaningful franchise record. 512 goals. 814 assists. 1,326 points. 1,191 games. Hall of Fame in 1990. Named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players in 2017. Number 11 retired. Nobody else has ever worn it. There's a bronze statue of the French Connection outside the arena in downtown Buffalo and fans still stop to take pictures with it.

One spin. That's what started all of it.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver

Quick version on what the other side got, because Vancouver's half of this story is shorter and sadder and doesn't need five paragraphs.

Dale Tallon went second overall. Defenseman from Rouyn-Noranda. Good player -- 56 points as a rookie, two All-Star games, made the 1972 Summit Series roster. Finished with 336 points in 642 career games across three teams. Had a terrific post-playing career: broadcast Blackhawks games for 16 years, became their GM, drafted Toews and Kane, built the core that won the 2010 Cup, then returned to the Canucks as a scout in 2022. Also won the 1969 Canadian Junior Golf Championship and played on the Canadian PGA Tour, because apparently he was good at everything.

336 career points versus 1,326. That's the gap. That's what the wheel cost Vancouver.

The Canucks spent decades having to manufacture their own luck at the draft. They exploited a loophole to grab Pavel Bure in the sixth round in 1989. They pulled off an insane multi-team trade sequence to land both Sedins in 1999. Every franchise-defining moment Vancouver has had at the draft required scheming and cleverness, because the one time luck was supposed to decide things for them, the president of the NHL couldn't read a wheel.

The Conspiracy Nobody Remembers

Everybody knows the 1985 NBA Draft Lottery. David Stern. Clear plastic drum. Seven envelopes. The Knicks' envelope has a crease on the corner. Stern grabs it. Patrick Ewing goes to New York. Conspiracy theories for the next 40 years. Books, documentaries, frame-by-frame video analysis. It's the most famous draft fix allegation in sports.

The NHL version has all the same ingredients. League official runs the process solo. No meaningful oversight. Result favours the best-connected franchise. Generational prospect goes to the "right" team. The losing side gets nothing but questions.

And almost nobody knows about it.

Partly that's a media thing. The 1985 NBA lottery was on live CBS television. The 1970 NHL wheel was spun at a luncheon. Partly it's a hockey thing -- the sport has always operated with less scrutiny. And partly the NHL has just never been good at telling its own stories, even the wild ones. Especially the wild ones.

So here it is. Fifteen years before David Stern reached into that drum, Clarence Campbell spun a carnival wheel, told the wrong team they'd won, got corrected by a guy in the front row, and handed a Hall of Famer to the franchise with the most connected owners in the room. The wheel landed on the winning GM's lucky number. The kid wore that number for 17 years.

The NHL didn't just have the first draft conspiracy in North American sports. They might have had the most blatant one. They just got away with it because nobody was paying attention.