Maple Leafs select Gavin McKenna No. 1 overall at NHL Draft
Toronto turned an 8.5% lottery shot into Gavin McKenna, while Justin Bieber announced the pick and fans packed a $10 watch party at Scotiabank Arena.
The Toronto Maple Leafs selected Gavin McKenna No. 1 overall at the 2026 Upper Deck NHL Draft on Friday, using the first pick they won in May to land the Penn State left wing at KeyBank Center in Buffalo. The choice gave Toronto its third No. 1 selection in franchise history, following Wendel Clark in 1985 and Auston Matthews in 2016.
The draft opened as a two-day event across 224 picks and 32 teams, with Round 1 on Friday and Rounds 2 through 7 on Saturday. ESPN carried the first round from 7 p.m. ET after a pre-draft show at 6 p.m. ET, putting Toronto’s selection at the center of a national broadcast window built for the league’s top prospect.
McKenna arrived with a profile that made the choice nearly unavoidable. TSN’s Craig Button called him a “no brainer” for Toronto and compared him to Mitch Marner, a gauge of the offensive upside the Maple Leafs were betting on with the top pick. The announcement came from Justin Bieber, adding a pop-culture spotlight to a moment that already carried rare weight for a franchise that had only once before reached the top of the board in the salary-cap era.
McKenna’s identification is unusually specific for a No. 1 pick in this draft cycle. His official WHL profile lists him as No. 72, a 6-foot-0, 165-pound left wing for the Medicine Hat Tigers. The NCAA’s draft records place him in a small historical class: he became the sixth NCAA player ever taken first overall, and Penn State became the fifth NCAA program to produce a No. 1 pick.
The reaction in Toronto extended well beyond Buffalo. The Maple Leafs staged a draft watch party at Scotiabank Arena on Friday, with admission tied to a $10 donation to MLSE Foundation. That turnout reflected the scale of the lottery win itself, since Toronto entered the draft with only an 8.5% chance of landing the top selection when it won the lottery on May 5. The result gave the club a rare chance to add a franchise centerpiece at the top of the draft, and it handed the league one of its most marketable prospects in the process.
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