Maple Leafs 2026 Draft Class Recap: Chayka's 10 Picks and the New Blueprint

The Maple Leafs 2026 Draft Class Is the Deepest Toronto Has Had in Years

The Maple Leafs 2026 draft class did not just start with Gavin McKenna at No. 1 — it kept going, and by the end of the weekend in Buffalo it had become the deepest Toronto haul in half a decade. John Chayka's first draft as general manager produced 10 new prospects, the most the franchise has selected in a single class since 2020, and the picks shared a clear identity: smart, competitive, puck-moving players who can skate. After years of trading away futures, the Leafs left the draft floor with a restocked cupboard at every position.

That total of 10 is itself a story. Toronto walked into Day 2 with seven selections, then added to the pile by trading Brandon Carlo to St. Louis for two third-round picks and flipping a 2027 fifth-rounder for an extra sixth. The result is a Maple Leafs 2026 draft class that touched defence, forward and goaltending — exactly the kind of broad, future-facing weekend a retooling team needs.

It Starts With Gavin McKenna at No. 1

Everything flows from the top pick. Toronto made Gavin McKenna the first selection of the 2026 NHL Draft, the centrepiece of a class that suddenly has a franchise-altering talent at its head. McKenna is the kind of prospect a rebuild is built around, and we broke down what Toronto is actually getting in our No. 1 overall pick deep dive. The rest of the weekend was about adding volume and fit around that anchor.

What makes the class interesting is that Chayka did not treat the No. 1 pick as the whole job. Most years, a Leafs draft was a quiet afternoon with a handful of late swings. This one was active from the first round to the seventh, with the front office working the phones to add picks rather than spend them.

A Third Round That Looked Like a Second

The heart of the Maple Leafs 2026 draft class was a loaded third round. Toronto held four selections in that range — the 69th, 73rd, 76th and 85th overall — and used them on a spread of profiles. The Leafs took defenceman Ethan MacKenzie at 69, right winger Zach Olsen at 73, defenceman Mans Gudmundsson at 76 and Finnish goaltender Juuso Ainasto at 85.

MacKenzie, 19, is coming off his fourth WHL season with the Edmonton Oil Kings, a defenceman with the kind of mobility Chayka's staff repeatedly emphasized. Olsen, a Calgary native, spent his junior years with the WHL's Saskatoon Blades, where the 6-foot-1 right winger chipped in secondary scoring — 18 goals and 34 points in 57 games. Two of those four picks, the ones at 73 and 76, came directly from the Carlo trade, which means the defenceman Toronto subtracted turned straight into a winger and a defence prospect.

The recurring scouting language around these picks — players who can move the puck, possess it, forecheck and make a play — is not an accident. It is the identity Chayka has been describing since he took the job, now stamped onto an actual draft board.

The Goaltending Bets

Chayka's group made a point of investing in the crease, taking two goaltenders in the class. The headliner is Ainasto, a 6-foot-4 Finnish netminder who split this past season between the U-18 and U-20 levels with Jokerit's junior program. At the U-18 level he posted a .938 save percentage and a 1.74 goals-against average across 12 appearances — eye-catching numbers for a big, projectable goalie taken in the third round.

The logic behind spending real draft capital on goaltenders is sound, and the Marlies just illustrated it. Toronto's AHL affiliate rode strong netminding to a Calder Cup title this spring, a reminder that goalie development is a long, unpredictable game where volume and patience pay off. Taking multiple swings at the position is how organizations eventually hit. You can revisit that championship run and the pipeline it exposed in our Calder Cup recap.

Forwards, Late Swings and the Cooper Williams Pick

Toronto kept adding forward depth deeper into the draft, including centre Cooper Williams at 158th overall. Williams, an 18-year-old listed at 6-foot-1, is a two-way forward who has shown consistent offensive ability across two WHL seasons with the Saskatoon Blades. He is a classic late-round developmental swing — the kind of player who, if the bet hits, becomes the steal of the class three or four years from now.

The broader point is volume. By drafting four defencemen, two goaltenders and a clutch of forwards, Chayka spread Toronto's bets across the roster rather than chasing a single position of need. For a franchise that spent years thin on graduating prospects, simply having 10 new names in the system is a structural win.

Volume also changes how you should grade a draft. No single late-round pick is likely to define this class, and most will never play an NHL game — that is the brutal math of the third round and beyond. But the more swings a team takes, the better its odds of landing one or two regulars, and the deeper its trade-deadline currency becomes down the road. Toronto has historically been on the wrong side of that equation, dealing futures to win now. This weekend was a deliberate correction.

What This Class Says About Chayka's Plan

Read together with the rest of the offseason, the Maple Leafs 2026 draft class confirms the direction. Chayka has been subtracting veterans — Joseph Woll, Samuel Ersson, now Carlo — and converting them into youth and flexibility, while reinforcing the pipeline through the draft. This is not a fire sale and it is not a tank; it is a deliberate reshaping of the organization's age curve around the existing core of Matthews, Nylander, Knies and Tavares.

The class also reflects a coherent scouting philosophy. Mobility, hockey IQ and competitiveness show up in pick after pick, from MacKenzie on the back end to the forwards taken later. Whether the individual swings hit is a question for 2028 and beyond, but the process — add picks, draft to a clear identity, invest in the hardest-to-develop positions — is exactly what a healthy front office is supposed to run.

It is also a notable break from how Toronto operated under previous regimes, where the draft was often an afterthought to the win-now core. Chayka treated it as a primary tool, working the phones to add selections rather than packaging them out for immediate help. For a roster still anchored by expensive veterans, building a cheap, controllable youth base underneath them is the only sustainable way to stay competitive under a flat-ish cap. This draft was step one.

What's Next for the New Prospects

Most of these players return to junior or European programs for 2026-27, with development camp the first chance for Toronto's staff to get hands-on. The ones to track early are McKenna, whose timeline is the most compressed, and the third-round group that Chayka's scouts believe punched above its draft slot. For the bigger offseason picture — free agency, the Rielly question and the cap — see our post-draft to-do list and keep tabs on the players page as these prospects start their climb. Either way, Chayka's first draft did what it needed to do: it gave the Maple Leafs a future to point to.