EDMONTON — The ready smiles and nervous laughter are dead giveaways and so are those dreamy, unfocused gazes.
Ask any National Hockey League general manager how their particular roster rebuild might go, were their franchise fortunate enough to land the No. 1 pick at the draft lottery on Saturday night and along with it the right to select wunderkind Connor McDavid, and the reactions don’t differ much.
They get that poleaxed look, all of a sudden, like a lovesick teenager.
“Somebody’s going to get a whole lot smarter after the first period of that game on Saturday,” Oilers GM Craig MacTavish said this week about the lottery, scheduled to be televised during the first intermission of Game 2 of the Pittsburgh Penguins-New York Rangers Stanley Cup playoff series.