The first overall - keep or trade?

Once you have a top-five draft pick in your hot little hands, you have to decide what to do with it. Now that the Leafs are clutching a very unexpected first overall pick, while knowing they will not have their first-round picks for the next two years no matter how good those picks are, they have choices to make.

Trading draft picks from the top of the first round is very rare. So their choices are:

1. Use the pick
2. Do a pick trade to get a similar pick and some other pick or player as well
3. Do a player trade to get a high quality player now

Using the Pick

This is by far the most probable choice the team will make because it's what teams do the overwhelming majority of the time. However, John Chayka has traded a seventh overall at the draft to acquire a player of high need, but that's a long way from a first overall. That move was for a starting goalie, and that is not a problem the Leafs need to address. There is some indication that wanting what I would call the rarest thing in the NHL – a goalie of elite status and consistency – is a strong motivator to trade high-value picks.

The argument for using the pick isn't just "that's what everyone else does" however. Players drafted in the top five are much more likely to become NHLers than players drafted later down the draft order. They are also much more likely to have long careers instead of merely meeting an arbitrary minimum level of games played. There is no guarantee, though.

Skaters with no Regular SeasonNHL Games Played by Pick since 1980

Note: this includes the 2025 draft where most of the players with no games were drafted.

Average Regular Season NHL Games Played by Skaters since 1980

Note: this includes all the recent years where players cannot have played significant numbers yet. This undersells the average.

The other argument for using the pick is that players drafted very early in the draft are much more likely to play in the NHL right away. This is not universal, as Mats Sundin played another year in Sweden post-draft for example.

Matthew Schaefer has set high expectations with a direct to NHL season of outstanding value. The only players between Matthews and Matthew to not play in the NHL immediately were Owen Power and Rasmus Dahlin, both defenders, both with Buffalo.

This gets into what the Leafs medium- to long-term plans are. Do they think they're heading for some sort of prolonged downturn and are just trying to stave that off? In that case a player who can make a splash now is useful, but that player would be spending his peak years on a team not trying to win. If they have some other thoughts on trying to retool and then have a longer period of rolling through players to be a perennial playoff team, then the thinking on the draft changes too.

The decision to use the pick has to be made in full knowledge of the projected future of the team, and also their scouting intelligence about the actual person would consider drafting at first overall.

Pick Trades

There are two different ways to do pick trades, although high-value picks have only ever been traded in one way – for another high-value pick at the same draft.

The other option involves swapping the pick for a pick in a subsequent year, and that carries a pile of risk that it won't end up as high a value as what the team could get right there at the draft floor. Why would the other team do it if they aren't assuming they'll get better?

The only way option one could ever happen is if the player choices in the given year were very unusually poor, and that's just not the case this year.

Using a host of public draft valuation analyses, which all return a graph of very similar shape, the probability that a top-five drafted player hits at least 100 games played is nearly 100%. We can't figure how much of that is draft bias very easily, so we need that average from the table above. Note how fast that number drops. It hits about half the top-five values at pick fifteen and hits 200 at the end of the first round.

I have never held a desire to reproduce this work, but an interesting university project by a fellow who now works professionally in sports analytics used a host of player value measures and got curves that are very similar and match up with Schuckers 2011 work. We need a general understanding of the value differences, and this is very fit for that purpose. The top five returns a kind of value vastly different to something like pick number 10.

High-value pick trades are usually for another pick very close in order because everyone in the NHL understands this value difference at the top end, even if they aren't very good with numbers. You won't see a top-five pick traded for a bunch of second rounders. While a pick value chart can call that equivalent, it really isn't. One elite player who can be elite for a career cannot be replaced by a group of secondary players.

There is a section of the draft where you don't want to drop out of, but where that line is varies in every draft. How a pick trade gets made should include understanding of the uniqueness of the draft year, and the scouting intelligence and not just focus on the average value.

The average is a good starting guide, though. That's one of the ways quantifying evidence works.

A pick trade made just using the PuckPedia calculator to try to make a trade of the first overall to the Sharks at second overall shows the Leafs would struggle to get back full value without taking a pick in next year's draft, but this is a way to get a "first-rounder" next year, albeit of unknown value.

No one is going to want to make a deal to get the first overall more than Vancouver, and they also have the Wild's first-round pick. That's not likely to be good enough to be the deal on its own, but it's an interesting idea.

St. Louis has two picks, the 11th and the 15th, but that's not good enough at the top end.

In order for a deal like this to happen, the other team has to want a player they think will be gone one or two spots later, and they have to want that player more than the team with the higher pick. That team has to actually want someone they think they can get lower down. Sometimes these deals have looked like a pick holder exercising some knowledge of which player a team wants in order to engineer the swap.

In the NHL Central Scouting video, they were very upfront about the total lack of consensus on everyone after Gavin McKenna in the North American list. It is more plausible this year than in most drafts, that a team might want to move up to get their guy. But is it plausible that someone other than McKenna is who the Leafs are going to want? That leads into the drafting a defenceman for current need debate which is complicated with a pick this good. Usually the answer is no, never do that, but I'm not in the Leafs scouting room, and I don't know what they know.

Player Trades

If a team is trading for a player with a pick of a high value, the return is usually impressive-looking at the time. It can be the only way to acquire some high-value NHLers without having an excess of proven high-value prospects to offer.

This is why this should be an idea the Leafs give full and complete attention to. That doesn't mean they should do it, and this option is very difficult to have a meaningful opinion on from the outside looking in. It depends on who is available, but how about we fantasize about a player of very high value and a player who fits exactly into a hole the Leafs would like to fill, and who is still at peak age. Even better, his team is doing some kind of serious rebuild.

Adam Fox is 28, a right-shooting defender and outstanding player. He's under contract for three years at $9.5 million and also has a full NMC, so while we're fantasizing, let's do it honestly and consider that he'd need to be willing to leave the Rangers because the Rangers aren't going to try to contend. And he'd have to be willing to go to the Leafs.

The difficulty in finding a player good enough, and available and acquirable is not to be overlooked here. So while this would be the best way for the Leafs to add high-value impact to the roster right now, and to get someone under 30 who fits that bill, it's hardly a simple process.

Conclusion

The choice the Leafs will make is going to be shaped by their overall strategy for beyond this moment in time, but also by what is possible to do.

My overall view on this question is always to trade the picks. Picks, even really good ones, have value in handfuls, not individually most of the time. Trading for players with excellent understanding of their value though analysis and pro scouting is a much lower risk way to build a team.

Most of the time.

This choice for the Leafs is going to be shaped as well by their amateur scouting and their pro scouting knowing exactly (to the extent possible) what any player in the draft or in a potential trade is worth.

Evidence-based decision making means throwing out any ideology about "draft and develop" or "picks are junk" and quantifying the choice within its real-world context.

This isn't the first decision the new management team has to make, but it's the biggest outside of the coaching choices.

The most likely outcome is they take Gavin McKenna on draft day, though.