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NHL Draft Lottery: Alexis Lafreniere Will Take Rangers' Rebuild into Overdrive

The New York Rangers lost the playoff-qualifying battle.

But they won the future-securing war.

When a ping-pong ball with the team’s classic red, white and blue logo was pulled to the top of a vacuum tube in the NHL’s draft lottery headquarters on Monday evening, the sports needle in midtown Manhattan and elsewhere in the Big Apple leaned a little bit closer to hockey.

The fortuitous bounce in the Rangers’ direction means they have a first crack in October at teen sensation Alexis Lafreniere, a 6’1”, 193-pound winger who’s lit up junior-level scoreboards with a skill set on a plane most recently occupied by the likes of Sidney Crosby and Connor McDavid.