If the Maple Leafs had come out of the 2026 NHL Draft Lottery without the first-overall pick, the whole thing could have gone sideways in a hurry.
Instead, Toronto won the lottery and landed Gavin McKenna. That is the reality. But there were a couple of very different paths this could have taken, and neither one would have been nearly as clean for the Leafs.
In one version, two teams jump ahead of Toronto. Even if only one club that finished behind the Leafs moved up in front of them, Toronto would have slid to sixth overall.
At that point, the Boston Bruins would have taken the pick, and the Leafs’ tank would have meant nothing. John Chayka then would have been left trying to fix the roster without McKenna, which, as the source puts it, would have been an absolute disaster.
Without him, the Leafs would have had trouble signing free agents like Sergei Bobrovsky.
A second scenario is a little kinder to Toronto, but still not ideal. In that version, the Vancouver Canucks win the top pick and another team, such as the New York Rangers, grabs second.
That would leave the Leafs with the fifth-overall selection. They could have kept it, but Chayka also would have had every reason to move it.
Unless he believed he could get a high-end blueliner like Chase Reid or Keaton Verhoeff, the pick would have been Toronto’s best trade chip. The logic is simple: the team is supposed to be retooling, not rebuilding, and Verhoeff or Reid likely wouldn’t help this NHL season anyway. They could be two or three years away from making a real impact.
Trading that pick might have brought back something similar to what the Chicago Blackhawks got with the fourth-overall selection, which netted Bowen Byram. The Leafs would not necessarily have landed Byram, but the kind of player available through that kind of deal would have been in that range.
Keeping the pick and using it on a top defenseman would have sent a different message entirely. It would have looked like a rebuild, and that is not the signal Chayka wanted to send.
So while Toronto’s actual outcome was already a win, the first-overall pick made it a dream result. The Leafs kept their first-rounder, landed McKenna, and avoided the messier versions of this alternate reality. In that sense, the hockey gods were kind to Toronto.
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