Gavin McKenna and the Maple Leafs: Toronto's No. 1 Pick Is Two Days Away

Gavin McKenna and the Maple Leafs: the night Toronto has waited for

On Friday night in Buffalo, the Toronto Maple Leafs will walk to the podium first. Barring a surprise that would rank among the strangest in modern draft history, Gavin McKenna and the Maple Leafs become a sentence Leafs fans say for the next decade. The 2026 NHL Draft opens June 26 at KeyBank Center, first round at 7 p.m. ET, and Toronto owns the No. 1 overall pick for the first time since it took Wendel Clark in 1985.

This is the payoff for a season that went sideways. The Leafs missed the 2025-26 playoffs, fired head coach Craig Berube in May, replaced general manager Brad Treliving with John Chayka, and then won the draft lottery that flipped a lost year into the most valuable asset in the sport: an 18-year-old who has been the consensus best player in his age group since he was 15.

Who is Gavin McKenna?

McKenna was born December 20, 2007, in Whitehorse, Yukon, which makes him one of the most unlikely No. 1 pick origin stories the draft has produced. There is no junior hockey pipeline in the Yukon. Getting to the level he plays at meant leaving home young, billeting in another province, and treating every weekend like an audition. He has spoken publicly, in features with NHL.com and ESPN, about being driven by his family and his Indigenous roots, and about the pressure of being the kid everyone has watched since bantam.

On the ice he is a 5-foot-11, roughly 170-pound left winger with elite vision and edgework, the kind of player who slows the game down and makes defencemen commit before he has decided what he is doing. Scouts compare his hockey sense and deception to the best playmakers in the league rather than to other prospects. For a deeper breakdown of his game and the projection, see our full scouting report on the Maple Leafs' No. 1 pick.

The numbers that made him untouchable

McKenna did not back into this. Across 162 regular-season games in the Western Hockey League with Medicine Hat, he piled up 295 points on 94 goals and 201 assists. His final WHL season, 2024-25, was absurd for a 17-year-old: 41 goals and 129 points in 56 games, then 38 points in 16 playoff outings.

Rather than return to junior, he reclassified to the NCAA and joined Penn State as a freshman for 2025-26, part of the wave of top prospects testing college hockey's new willingness to take CHL players. He won the Big Ten scoring title with 38 points in 24 conference games and set Penn State's single-season assist record. He did all of it as one of the youngest players on the ice. Nothing about his season changed the projection that has followed him for years.

What John Chayka has actually said

Chayka has been careful in public, which is its own kind of message. He has not stated outright that the Leafs will draft McKenna, telling reporters only that "the probability is we take the pick" and that Toronto is going best player available while considering five or six names. Read that the way scouts read it: the Leafs are doing the due diligence a No. 1 pick demands, listening on the small chance someone overpays to move up, and almost certainly walking to the podium and calling McKenna's name.

The alternative — trading the pick — has been talked to death this month, and we covered the realistic full draft board and what Toronto does beyond No. 1. The short version: there is no package a rival can build that returns more long-term value than an 18-year-old franchise winger on an entry-level contract. Chayka did not take this job to flip that.

How McKenna fits Toronto's retool

This is where the pick gets interesting for the Leafs specifically. Toronto is not a tank job bottoming out for a generational talent. It is a team with Auston Matthews, William Nylander, Matthew Knies and a clear win-soon mandate that suddenly added the draft's best prospect. McKenna does not have to carry a rebuild. He gets to develop behind established stars, which is the softest possible landing for a teenager.

The fit question is timing. McKenna is signed to Penn State and could return to college, meaning Toronto may not see him in a Leafs sweater until 2027 or later. Chayka has framed this offseason as a retool rather than a teardown, and McKenna is the cornerstone that makes that language credible — you can sell patience to a fan base when the future has a face. We dug into that balance in our piece on why the McKenna pick makes this a retool, not a rebuild.

For now, McKenna slots into a forward group that already has high-end finish. Long term, a Matthews-Nylander-McKenna spine is the kind of top end that wins playoff series, provided the Leafs solve the defence and goaltending questions that have followed them for years. You can track the current depth chart on our players page.

How draft night will unfold

The first round runs Friday, June 26 (7 p.m. ET; ESPN, ESPN+, Sportsnet, TVA Sports). Rounds 2 through 7 follow Saturday, June 27 at 11 a.m. ET. Toronto holds the No. 1 pick plus a cluster of selections that thicken on Day 2, including the second-round pick acquired in the Scott Laughton trade with Los Angeles and a third-rounder from the Joseph Woll deal with Philadelphia.

Expect Toronto on the clock almost immediately when the broadcast opens — there is no suspense before No. 1, only the formality of Chayka or a Leafs executive stepping to the microphone. The real intrigue starts after, as 31 other teams sort through a class that gets murky fast outside the top handful. For everything Toronto does after McKenna, our draft hub tracks every Leafs selection live.

What's next for McKenna and the Leafs

Once the pick is official, the conversation shifts to development path. Does McKenna return to Penn State for a sophomore year, or does he push to turn pro? Either way, the Leafs control his rights and have no reason to rush a player who will not turn 19 until December. Toronto's bigger offseason work — the Morgan Rielly situation, a thin free-agent market, and the goaltending reshuffle after the Woll trade — happens in parallel and arguably matters more for next season.

There is also a development plan to design. Toronto's player-development staff has spent the spring with the Marlies group that just won the Calder Cup, and McKenna would slot into a pipeline that suddenly looks like a strength rather than an afterthought. Whether he spends 2026-27 at Penn State, in the AHL, or pushing for an NHL look, the Leafs will be deliberate. Rushing a franchise winger to chase one extra season of mediocrity is exactly the mistake a patient front office is built to avoid, and Chayka has shown no appetite for it.

But Friday is about the long game. The Maple Leafs spent years chasing the Stanley Cup with a finished core and came up short. The lottery handed them something they have not had in a generation: a blue-chip teenager to build the next contention window around. The Gavin McKenna Maple Leafs era starts in Buffalo. The rest of the story is up to Chayka.