2026 T25U25: Gavin McKenna is #1

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Gods gifting mere mortals with objects that change the course of their lives forever is a very, very old narrative trope. When someone, for example, thrusts their hand up out of a lake wielding a sword, the response – not even in a Monty Python movie – is not to stand around complaining about the heft of it, the length of it, the edge, followed up by derisive claims that it really isn't that good, and there have been much sharper swords and what we all really want is a mace. All before anyone takes hold of it and wields it.

Alas, hockey fans are a different breed. Every complaint, worry, criticism, angry and bitter recrimination, trolling nonsense, miserable negativity, performative doomerism and self-aggrandizing, self-flagellating pessimistic bit of tripe that could be uttered about Gavin McKenna has already been sent out into the world stinking of ill will and ill temper.

Let's open the window and air this place out.

Gavin McKenna	Vitals
Age as of July 1	18.53
Position	LW
Height	5'11"
Weight (lbs)	170
Shoots	L
Draft Year	2026
Draft Number	1

The Player

The very first thing I wrote about McKenna was a profile of his rise out of Whitehorse to the consensus first overall pick. I liked him more the more I wrote, and I will confess that the cinematic perfection of a young man with so many similarities to Auston Matthews coming onto the Leafs as Matthews nears age 30 predisposes me towards him.

He has come from a place where it's hard to get elite hockey training – albeit not in the same way as growing up in Arizona. He left home at a very young age, put his trust in coaches and trainers, people still in his life today, and his mother had to do the work to maintain the family connection. Their sisters bear more than a passing resemblance to each other, their ethnicity more obvious than the two brothers who have to explain every so often who they are.

The doubts about Matthews had to be manufactured as fodder for the social media machines that need controversy as fuel. For McKenna it just grew louder and louder, more and more absurd – remember when he was so small compared to the big tough man from Sweden? And then they stood side by side for a photo and that fabulism... well it didn't go away. I think that's the problem now. Reality can't clear the air.

We are about to see – days from now – Gavin McKenna, the version who is an actual human who lives on the earth and is made up of all his past actions, mistakes, successes, trials, tribulations, beliefs and work and talent. And we've never really seen him before. We've spent months debating a simulacrum created in bad faith.

I'm not absolutely sure I know who he is anymore.

Oh, yeah, that guy! The one with all the very elite, elite, elite, elite skills. He's meh in terms of some defence so far, and he is a playmaker, not a shooter. Because so many people called him a Mitch Marner clone, the necessity to refute that seemed to pull the discussion too far away from the reality that they do indeed have a very great deal in common. For example: neither is a great shooter and they don't get very good individual expected goals because of a low shot rate and a habit of circulating in the playmaker's zone and shooting very few shots from the highest-danger areas. It's a feature, not a bug.

Yes, I am worried we are about to have 10+ years of discussion about how McKenna should shoot more, be a threat to fuddle the mind of the goalie, because as you recall, Auston Matthews struggled to score a lot with Marner on his line due to those unfuddled goalies. I'll prep the articles now about how his shot rate has never changed, because chances are it won't. I know a guy for whom it did, but that's not a story for today.

Elite offence creation, that's another similarity. Weeks ago, or just yesterday for you, I wrote about Matt Knies and Easton Cowan not showing any particular skill in that regard. That's not a shot at them, because it isn't actually all that common for forwards to do more than participate well at offence. I do not need to describe for you how Marner created offence, you have all seen it in iterations unnumberable. Same with Matthews or Nylander or Rielly. McKenna processes the game better than we all do just sitting on our butts and watching it. That's the core of it. He is a creative force.

In a few days we will learn the ways of Darren Raddysh and Gavin McKenna. Those two? They fit together perfectly. Left-shooting winger who can pass it like it's laser-guided and a right-shooting defender who can launch it like a rocket.

We are about to see that. It will be beautiful. Picture that in your mind the next time someone bangs on about how much McKenna weighs or how he's not Matthew Shaefer.

McKenna is not going to be the guy that goes and bangs bodies in the corners, and sure, I bet he needs to grow in his approach to the game, as everyone does who plays in the NHL at 19. But one of the biggest holes in the Leafs is the one left by Marner. We spent a lot of time rationalizing how that would be possible to overcome and then gave that up as pointless in the face of last season. But those rationalizations had merit. Less offence creation was just something we had to accept and the way to cope with that is to up the defence creation.

This holds true now as McKenna is just beginning to become the man who will be an elite creator in the NHL. He's going to do his becoming in tandem with Raddysh, and they should fit together well in that respect too, since Raddysh is a man who had no trouble orbiting the sun that is Nikita Kucherov (6 feet, 173 lbs).

What we never discussed while we were busy finding flaws was how important McKenna's self-image, determination, ego, bravado and arrogance will be to leaving the humble act in the media scrum and being a guy who has a gravitational pull on the ice. He's got it. And where better to have that than Toronto?

The Votes

No doubt here, but we'll have a talk about that Community Vote in due time.

Voter	Vote
Cathy	1
Species	1
Hound Line	1
Shinson93	1
Cameron	1
Sclodiggity	1
Brian S	1
Svalbard38	1
Zone Entry	1
Hardev	1
Adam	1
Weighted Average	1
Highest Vote	1
Lowest Vote	1

The Opinions

Sclodiggity: What needs be said. It’s Gavin McKenna.

Shinson93: No need to second guess this. First overall picks deserve the top spot, unless and until they show some reason not to be. I expect this guy to deliver the goods.

Zone Entry:
G McK
G McK
One more first overall, hooray!
Auston’s wing?
Willy’s mate?
Think he’s gonna be pretty great
SO YEAH
Let’s welcome G McK

Svalbard38: The guy we’ve been talking about for years, and he’s a Toronto Maple Leaf. The number 12 ball changed everything for this franchise.

Species: Gavin McKenna is a Maple Leaf.

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