Gavin McKenna’s former coaches can’t stop talking about the mentality of Toronto Maple Leafs’ expected first pick
The Toronto Maple Leafs won the 2026 NHL Draft Lottery earlier this month and will pick first overall at the draft in Buffalo on June 26. It was a surprise given Toronto finished 28th in the league this season with a 32–36–14 record and missed the playoffs for the first time in a decade, giving them just a slim chance at the top pick. But the balls bounced their way, and now they hold the number one selection.
The player projected to go first overall is none other than Gavin McKenna, the 18-year-old winger from Whitehorse, Yukon. McKenna has been at the top of draft rankings for years. He put up 129 points in 56 WHL games with Medicine Hat last season, set a modern CHL record with a 54-game point streak, won CHL Player of the Year and then moved to Penn State for his draft year and led the team with 51 points in 35 NCAA games.
There is some discussion around Ivar Stenberg and Keaton Verhoeff, and the Leafs haven’t said publicly who they will take. But the expectation across the draft community is that McKenna goes first to Toronto.
With the draft about six weeks away, two of McKenna’s former head coaches spoke publicly about him this past week, his WHL coach in Medicine Hat and a rival NCAA coach who recruited him. Between them, they gave a clear picture of his work ethic and how he handles pressure. Here is what they said.
Willie Desjardins (Medicine Hat Tigers, WHL): “He wouldn’t accept being average”
Willie Desjardins coached McKenna in Medicine Hat from 2022 to 2025. He has also coached in the NHL with Vancouver and Los Angeles and led Canada at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Desjardins had an appearance on First Up last week, where he shared insight into Gavin McKenna’s drive to improve using a specific story from McKenna’s rookie season to illustrate it.
During his rookie WHL year, McKenna was 16 years old and sitting third in rookie scoring at around 1.3 points per game. He came back after the Christmas break and told Desjardins it wasn’t good enough, asking to come in daily for video sessions with the assistant coach. As Desjardins recalled:
“He came back at Christmas time, he was about 1.3 points a game, and he goes, ‘That’s not good enough. I need to be better than that.’ And then he said, ‘I gotta come in and meet, and we gotta do video every day,’ and he did that with my assistant coach, Joel Fraser,” Desjardins narrated.
McKenna then averaged over 2.3 points per game in January. Desjardins on what that said about McKenna as a player overall:
“He wouldn’t accept being average. He wanted to be really good; he wanted the team to be good, so he was great to coach. He was smart; he could make adjustments. When we won, he was the key guy along that drive. There were lots of moments during the season that he would carry us. And he was young then, too, like really young. For a young player to carry us, it was pretty outstanding.”
Desjardins was also asked whether McKenna could handle the pressure of playing in Toronto. He said you can never know for certain, but pointed to what he saw from him over three years:
“He’s been tagged with this exceptional player status for a long time. We’d be on the road, get off the bus, and there would be fans there waiting for him. It’s just different; he’s grown up with it. It’s a tough market, and there are lots of older players that just can’t play in that type of market, let alone a young player. You can never tell. You can think people will react in a certain way, it doesn’t mean they will. There’s pressure with it for sure, but I think he’d handle it as well as anybody because I think he’s grown up with it a little bit.”
David Carle (University of Denver, NCAA)
David Carle is the head coach at the University of Denver. He has won three of the last five NCAA national championships and coached the United States to back-to-back World Championship gold medals in 2024 and 2025. Denver recruited McKenna before he chose Penn State, so Carle watched him closely without having any stake in how his career goes from here.
Carle appeared on Leafs Morning Take this past week. He talked about what stood out to him when watching McKenna at Medicine Hat and at Penn State, starting with his hockey sense:
“We recruited Gavin a little bit last year. Certainly, watched him a lot in Medicine Hat, and just an ultra-dynamic wizard. His sense of the game, I think, is what really separates him. When you watch him at Penn State, very few players know what they’re going to do with the puck or do on the ice, but Gavin has a sense of knowing what the other nine players are doing.”
Carle then put McKenna’s playmaking reads into a specific comparison. He was referring to the way McKenna processes the ice and sets up plays two or three steps before they develop:
“His ability to read the play, two, three steps ahead as a playmaker and distributor, is almost like when you watch Kucherov on the power play.”
Nikita Kucherov is a three-time Stanley Cup champion and widely considered one of the best playmakers in the NHL right now. Carle was not saying McKenna’s overall game is equivalent to Kucherov’s, as he was drawing a parallel specifically to the way both players see the ice and distribute the puck ahead of the play. It is a notable comparison from a coach who watched McKenna closely enough to recruit him and has no reason to inflate the assessment.
McKenna is the crown jewel the Leafs mustn’t pass
Desjardins and Carle come at McKenna from different angles, but they are pointing at the same thing. McKenna is a player whose instincts and competitive drive are already well beyond his age.
The numbers back all of it up. In his final WHL season, McKenna put up 129 points in 56 games, leading the league in assists and finishing second in overall scoring, outproducing what both Connor McDavid and Connor Bedard did in their respective draft years at the same stage.
He then skipped the easier path of returning to the WHL and instead went to Penn State, where, as an 18-year-old freshman, he finished tied for fifth in the entire NCAA with 51 points in 35 games, second in the league in points per game at 1.46. He also posted 14 points in seven games for Canada at the World Juniors, finishing second in tournament scoring.
Toronto is getting a high-end offensive talent; both coaches make that clear. And there is quite a bit more to him than just the highlights.
