Leafs Win 2026 Draft Lottery, Land No. 1 Overall Pick at 8.5% Odds

The ping pong balls finally bounced their way

The Leafs draft lottery drought is over, and it ended in the most improbable way possible. On Tuesday night the Toronto Maple Leafs won the 2026 NHL Draft Lottery from the fifth-best odds — a slim 8.5% chance — vaulting to the No. 1 overall pick and the first top selection the franchise has held in a decade. After a season that delivered nothing but misery, a single drawing handed the Leafs the most valuable asset in hockey: the right to pick first.

For a fan base conditioned to expect the worst outcome of any coin flip, this was vertigo-inducing. Toronto finished 28th overall at 32-36-14, missed the playoffs for the first time since 2015-16, and walked into the lottery behind four teams with better odds. None of it mattered. The balls came up Leafs, and an offseason that began with a firing and a reset now has a centrepiece. The San Jose Sharks landed the No. 2 pick; the Vancouver Canucks, who entered with the best odds in the league, fell to third.

Just how unlikely this was

Eight and a half percent is not a number that wins lotteries. Toronto held the fifth-best odds, meaning the four worst teams in the league — Vancouver chief among them — all had a better mathematical claim to the top pick. The Leafs jumped every one of them. We laid out the full probability tree before the drawing in our lottery math breakdown, and the short version was that keeping a pick was plausible but winning outright was a long shot. The long shot hit.

This is also a rare moment of historical weight. It is just the third time in franchise history the Leafs will pick first overall. The previous two are not small names: Auston Matthews in 2016 and Wendel Clark in 1985, two players who became the face of their respective eras in Toronto. Whoever the club selects on June 26 joins a very short, very consequential list.

The prize: Gavin McKenna

The reason this lottery mattered so much is the player waiting at the top of the board. Gavin McKenna, an 18-year-old left wing, is the consensus No. 1 prospect and the headliner of NHL Central Scouting's final rankings. He spent 2025-26 doing things teenagers are not supposed to do in NCAA hockey, and he did them at Penn State after a record-shredding major-junior career.

McKenna's freshman line at Penn State reads 51 points — 15 goals, 36 assists — in 34 games, second in the entire country and good for a Big Ten scoring title and conference Freshman of the Year honours. He was a Hobey Baker top-10 finalist as an 18-year-old. The signature night came against Ohio State on February 20, when he put up eight points, including seven assists, the most points in an NCAA Division I game in 39 years. Scouts talk about his hockey sense and edge-work the way they once talked about Connor McDavid's. For a Leafs system that has not produced a homegrown top-line forward since Matthews, he is exactly the kind of player a rebuild is built around.

The other name in the room

McKenna is the favourite, but he is not the only conversation. Ivar Stenberg, an 18-year-old left wing with Frölunda of the Swedish Hockey League, is No. 1 on Central Scouting's international list and a legitimate alternative at the top. His résumé is its own kind of staggering: 33 points in 43 SHL games, the most by an 18-year-old in that league since the Sedin twins in 1998-99, plus a team-leading 10 points in seven games as Sweden won World Junior gold.

The Leafs now own the luxury of that debate rather than watching it from the outside. McKenna profiles as the dynamic, high-ceiling scorer; Stenberg as the two-way wing who never takes a shift off. We make the full case for McKenna as the Leafs' top pick elsewhere, but the smart money points one direction. McKenna is the rare prospect a franchise reshapes its future around, and a team that just won an 8.5% lottery is not going to overthink the gift.

What it means for the rebuild

Context matters here, because this pick does not land in a vacuum. The Leafs are in the middle of a front-office teardown — a new general manager, a Hall of Fame adviser, a coaching question still unresolved. Dropping a generational forward prospect into that reset changes the entire calculus. Instead of patching an aging core with free-agent money, the new regime gets to build around a cost-controlled, high-ceiling 18-year-old on an entry-level deal. That is the single most valuable thing a capped-out team can acquire.

It also reframes the cap crunch. A team paying premium dollars to a veteran core desperately needs cheap, productive youth to balance the books, and a No. 1 pick is the purest version of that. McKenna or Stenberg will not fix the cap sheet overnight, but a top-line forward on a rookie contract is the kind of asset that keeps a contention window open while the expensive contracts run their course.

The road to Buffalo

The selection becomes official at the 2026 NHL Draft, hosted at KeyBank Center in Buffalo. The first round goes Friday, June 26, with rounds two through seven the following day, Saturday, June 27. It is a short drive across the border for a Leafs contingent that will, for once, be walking to the podium first instead of waiting their turn.

Between now and then, the prospects run the gauntlet of the scouting calendar — the combine, the interviews, the medicals. McKenna is among the names set to perform at the NHL Scouting Combine, and the Leafs' new brain trust will get its closest look yet at the player it is widely expected to draft. For everything else on the board, including where the rest of Toronto's picks fall, our draft hub tracks the full slate.

The bigger picture

Step back and the symbolism is hard to miss. The last time the Leafs picked first, they took Auston Matthews and launched the era that has just unravelled. Now, with that era in transition, the franchise gets a do-over at the very top of the draft — a chance to plant the next cornerstone before the old one is even gone. Lotteries do not owe anyone anything, and this one happened to fall to the team that needed it most and expected it least.

There is a temptation, in Toronto, to brace for the catch — the part where the good news curdles. Not this time. Winning the No. 1 pick at 8.5% is unambiguously, uncomplicatedly good. The Leafs got the bounce. Now they have to make the pick count.

What's next

Attention turns to the combine, the final scouting reports, and the new front office's evaluation process ahead of June 26. The expectation is McKenna, but the club will do its homework on Stenberg and the rest of the class before committing. Either way, for the first time in a decade the Leafs control the very top of the draft — and a rebuild that started in chaos suddenly has a foundation to pour. Keep an eye on the draft hub as the pick comes into focus.