Maple Leafs land Gavin McKenna as 2026 NHL draft shakes up league

Toronto turned 8.5% lottery odds into Gavin McKenna, then used the top pick to give a last-place team a cleaner path through the next two to three seasons. The 2026 NHL draft finished at KeyBank Center in Buffalo with 224 prospects changing teams over two days, but the biggest move was Toronto’s, after the Maple Leafs won the May 5 lottery and secured the right to select the consensus No. 1 prospect.

John Chayka, introduced as Toronto’s new general manager on May 4, framed the win as both luck and leverage. “You need some luck, and we got it tonight,” Chayka said, calling the pick a “monumental opportunity.” The selection matched Toronto’s need for a reset after finishing last in the Atlantic Division and missing the playoffs for the first time in 10 seasons. McKenna arrived after a dominant freshman season at Penn State, where the 18-year-old had 51 points in 35 games, with 15 goals and 36 assists, and ranked second in NCAA points per game at 1.46.

Toronto’s draft position also carried built-in risk management. If the Maple Leafs’ pick had fallen outside the top five, it would have transferred to Boston as part of the Brandon Carlo trade, a safeguard that showed how aggressively Toronto had to navigate its own timeline. The club also faced uncertainty around its 2027 first-round pick, which NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly called a “complicated situation” when asked to sort through the Scott Laughton trade implications.

Chicago went the other way. The Blackhawks entered the lottery with a 13.5% chance at No. 1, a 14.1% chance to stay at No. 2, a 30.7% chance to slide to No. 3 and a 41.7% chance to fall to No. 4. They ended up with the No. 4 slot after Toronto and San Jose jumped ahead, but the value had already been stripped away because Chicago had moved that pick to Buffalo in a Bowen Byram deal before the draft. That left the Blackhawks without a first-rounder and pushed their work into the margins, where they finished with two seventh-round selections.

The New York Rangers landed on the losers side for a different reason: the draft had already been warped by trades before the first pick in Buffalo. In a league where several teams spent major assets to accelerate their competitive clock, the Rangers left the weekend still searching for a cleaner roster and cap plan, while Toronto used its lottery break to lock in a centerpiece and Chicago was forced into depth-building mode.