Gavin McKenna Ranking Lands at No. 18 on The Athletic's Under-23 List

The number that lit up Leafs timelines this week

The Gavin McKenna ranking that landed this week is not the one Toronto has spent the summer getting used to. Corey Pronman of The Athletic published his annual survey of the best players and prospects under 23 in hockey, a list of 156 names headlined by Macklin Celebrini, and the first-overall pick of the 2026 draft came in at No. 18. That is a long way from No. 1, and Leafs fans noticed within about ninety seconds.

The reaction was predictable. So was the framing that followed: several players Toronto could have taken in June, and several it never had a chance at, are ranked ahead of the player it did take. That is true. It is also, on inspection, close to meaningless as a criticism of the pick.

Here is our position. The No. 18 placement is a defensible read of a specific question, and that question is not "who is the best prospect in hockey." Pronman answered that one already in July, and McKenna was his answer.

What the under-23 list actually measures

This is the distinction doing all the work, and most of the noise this week came from people collapsing it.

The top-100 prospect list Pronman released in the summer ranks players who have not yet established themselves in the NHL. On that list, McKenna was No. 1 overall and Easton Cowan came in at No. 70 — a result we covered when it dropped in our piece on Toronto's placement in The Athletic's top 100. That list is a projection exercise. It asks who will be best.

The under-23 list is a different animal. It folds in every player under 23 who has already played NHL games — Celebrini, Connor Bedard, Lane Hutson, Matvei Michkov, the whole cohort — alongside the prospects. It is closer to a present-value ranking with future value baked in. A 21-year-old who has already put up 80 points in the league is going to sit ahead of an 18-year-old who has never played an NHL shift, because one of those things is proven and the other is not.

McKenna has never played an NHL shift. Seventeen players on that list have, in most cases with real production. Eighteenth is roughly where the best unproven player in the world belongs on a list built that way.

The Gavin McKenna ranking against players Toronto passed on

The sharper version of the complaint is that McKenna sits behind names from his own draft cycle and the ones just before it — Keaton Verhoeff, Chase Reid, Cole Hutson and Alberts Smits among them. Verhoeff is the one that stings, because the North Dakota defenceman went inside the top 10 in June and was the loudest "what if" attached to Toronto's pick.

Two things about that. First, defencemen and forwards get evaluated on different curves at this stage, and a right-shot defenceman with size who has already handled NCAA minutes is an easier player to feel certain about than a winger whose value is concentrated in creativity. Certainty and ceiling are not the same thing, and lists like this reward certainty.

Second, and more to the point: Pronman himself has McKenna as the No. 1 prospect in hockey. He has not changed his mind about the player. He has answered a different question and gotten a different number. Treating the Gavin McKenna ranking as a demotion is a reading error, not a scouting insight.

The fair criticism of Toronto at No. 1 was never "you took the wrong player." It was that McKenna is a playmaker in an organization that already has playmakers and needs finishers. That argument survives this list intact. It just has nothing to do with the number 18.

The Penn State season underneath the ranking

McKenna spent 2025-26 at Penn State and led the team in scoring with 51 points — 15 goals and 36 assists in 35 games. As a 17-and-18-year-old. Against men, in a conference that does not hand anything to freshmen.

The shape of that line is the thing worth staring at. Thirty-six assists to 15 goals is a 70-30 split toward distribution, and it is consistent with everything scouts said about him through his Medicine Hat years: the puck skills and the vision are the elite traits, and the shot is very good rather than generational.

That profile is why he is No. 1 on a prospect list and No. 18 on a list that includes goal-scorers who are already scoring goals in the NHL. It is also why Toronto's plan to run him with Auston Matthews makes sense in a way the depth-chart-shuffling version of the debate misses. Put the best young distributor in hockey next to the best goal-scorer of his generation and the fit answers itself.

Beyond the Gavin McKenna ranking: Cowan at 128 and the rest of Toronto's five

Five Maple Leafs made the list: McKenna, Cowan, Tinus Luc Koblar, Mans Gudmundsson and Patriks Pluminš.

Cowan at No. 128 is the placement that should actually bother Toronto, and it is the one nobody argued about. He is the only Leaf on the list who has played meaningful NHL hockey — 66 games last season, 11 goals and 18 assists — and the ranking reads as a verdict on what that season looked like rather than on what he might become. He was in and out of the lineup through the fall and finished with nine points in his last 15 games, which is the split that makes him hard to rank. Evaluators saw a player who took most of a season to look like he belonged.

That is a fixable problem, and Cowan is in position to fix it. He is going to play a full NHL season in 2026-27, and the only live question is how much of it comes in the top six. We laid out that runway in our look at Cowan's roster spot and top-six audition. A 20-goal season answers No. 128 more convincingly than any argument will.

Koblar and Gudmundsson appearing at all is the quieter win. Neither was a premium pick, both are still in Europe, and both showing up on a 156-name league-wide list says Toronto's recent European drafting has been better than its reputation.

The bigger number is 12

Buried under the McKenna argument is the result that matters more for the next five years: Pronman slotted Toronto 12th of 32 in overall under-23 talent.

Rewind 18 months. The Leafs were a consensus bottom-five system, the price of a decade of trading futures for rentals and paying four forwards enormous money. Twelfth is not elite. It is also a genuinely startling place to be after a single offseason, and it happened because the lottery ball landed and because John Chayka spent the summer converting NHL roster pieces into picks and young players rather than the other way around.

The honest caveat: a lot of that 12th-place standing is one player. Systems that are top-heavy get punished when the top player takes longer than expected, and McKenna carrying this much of the organizational future is a risk even if he is very good very quickly. Depth in a pipeline is what protects you from being wrong about your best prospect.

What's next

Camp opens in the second week of September, the preseason starts September 19 with split-squad games against Montreal, and the Leafs open the regular season at home to the Canadiens on September 29. McKenna will be in the lineup for most of it, and the nine-game decision on his entry-level contract arrives in late October.

By then the Gavin McKenna ranking argument will be a footnote. Lists like Pronman's are useful as a snapshot of how the industry reads a player before the evidence arrives, and the evidence starts in five weeks. Check the roster page and the draft hub for where each of Toronto's five ranked names lines up when camp opens.

Our read: McKenna finishes 2026-27 inside the top 10 of this same list, and the argument about No. 18 will look like what it is — a scoreboard from the last week of the offseason.