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The Leafs Fell Ass-Backward Into Gavin McKenna
May 6, 2026
Posted 1 hour ago by
At the NHL Draft lottery drawing, some of the league's most woeful, benighted, talent-free franchises came together to find out they'll be drafting third and later. Moving up to take the second pick in a draft class with a consensus top 2 are the San Jose Sharks, who will make their third top-2 selection in three years. And selecting first in the Gavin McKenna Sweepstakes will be the damn Toronto Maple Leafs.
If the little men skating around inside your television is a TV show above all else—and it is—this is probably the most entertaining outcome we could have gotten. The Leafs bucked the odds, entering the lottery with an 8.5 percent chance of winning the top pick, fifth-longest odds in the field. They leapfrogged some truly terrible teams, but that's the way the ping-pong ball bounces, and they'll be rewarded with McKenna, the 18-year-old Penn State forward who's been tapped as the gem of this draft class for a couple years now, and enters the league with more hype than anyone since Connor Bedard. Only morons believe draft lotteries are rigged, but if this one were, this is how they would've rigged it. https://youtu.be/TahOTKkwrQ8?si=7DedmfUNp4KWH7fUt=233
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