There is electricity in the air in Buffalo, and it is not just the summer storms rolling off Lake Erie. The 2026 NHL Draft is three weeks away and the hockey world — scouts, agents, general managers, obsessive fans with colour-coded spreadsheets — is vibrating at a frequency that borders on the irrational. By the end, 224 picks will be made. That’s 224 moments that will echo through franchise histories for decades. Some of these general managers will look like geniuses in ten years. Some of them will be unemployed. That is the savage beauty of draft night, and it is coming for all of them whether they are ready or not.
Here is how the top five unfolds.
Pick #1 — Toronto Maple Leafs
Gavin McKenna | LW | Penn State University (NCAA)
Let’s be honest about something: the Toronto Maple Leafs had no business winning this lottery. An 8.5% chance. Less than one in ten. The kind of odds that make actuaries laugh and fans pray. And yet there they were — Mats Sundin at the podium, grinning like a man who had just pulled the sword from the stone — and the hockey world lost its collective mind for approximately forty-five seconds before realizing what had just happened.
The Maple Leafs are going to select Gavin McKenna first overall, and if they do not, someone should be fired immediately and without severance.
McKenna is, to borrow a phrase from the scouts who have been chasing this kid since he was fifteen years old, a tier-of-his-own talent. His hockey sense, quickness, and maturity allow him to dictate play at every level he has touched, and he has touched all of them — the WHL, where he scored 129 points in 56 games and set a CHL record with a 54-game point streak, and then Penn State, where he arrived as the most hyped freshman in college hockey history and delivered on every syllable of it. He put up 51 points in 35 games — fifth in the entire NCAA — while playing over 20 minutes in five different outings and more than 25 minutes in six games, the kind of workload that coaches only hand to players they trust completely.
The knock on McKenna — and there is always a knock — is his off-puck engagement and his lean 170-pound frame. Evaluators noted a need to be more physically engaged and show more effort away from the puck. Fair enough. He is eighteen years old. He will get bigger. He will get stronger. And when he does, the NHL is going to have a very serious problem on its hands.
Toronto is the biggest market in hockey. The pressure there is unlike anything else in the sport — a city that has been starving for a championship since 1967, that dissects every transaction and every lineup decision with the intensity of a Senate hearing. McKenna is not just a hockey player. He is a personality. He is a story. He is the kind of young superstar that a city like Toronto needs as badly as it needs wins. He goes first. It is not a debate. It is not a decision. It is a coronation.
The Pick: Gavin McKenna. First overall. It was always going to be this.
Pick #2 — San Jose Sharks
Chase Reid | RD | Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds (OHL)
The San Jose Sharks have Macklin Celebrini. They have Will Smith. They have the forward core of what should be a dangerous team within the next three years — young, skilled, ambitious, and hungry in the way that only franchises coming off the bottom of the standings can be. What they do not have — what they have not had in years — is a defenceman who makes the opposition genuinely nervous. A defenceman who controls a game. A defenceman who, on a Tuesday night in February, makes you think: we cannot get through this guy.
Enter Chase Reid.
NHL Central Scouting calls him a take-charge type of defenceman who dictates the game — a smooth skater with a Jake Sanderson comparable and the conditioning and matchup-minute ability to handle the heaviest defensive assignments from night one. In the OHL with the Soo Greyhounds this season, Reid posted 18 goals — fifth among all defencemen in the entire league — and finished with 48 points in 45 games while stepping up in Cole Hutson’s absence for Team USA at the World Juniors and delivering.
He is 6-foot-2, 194 pounds, right-handed, and physically ready for the professional game in a way that most eighteen-year-olds simply are not. He is considered an outstanding skater at his size and is set to join Michigan State next season — a development path that will only add to a game that is already college-ready.
San Jose drafting Celebrini last year and Reid this year is the kind of foundational building that dynasties are constructed around. The Sharks are not a playoff team yet. But draft nights like this one are exactly how you get there, and anyone who dismisses what San Jose is building is not paying close enough attention.
The Pick: Chase Reid. The piece the Sharks have been missing. The Blue Line anchor of a team about to become very dangerous.
Pick #3 — Vancouver Canucks
Ivar Stenberg | LW/RW | Frölunda HC (SHL)
Here is where the story gets genuinely interesting — and where the city of Vancouver, a fanbase that endured one of the most painful lottery nights in recent memory, gets to exhale.
The Canucks had the best odds. The Canucks fell to third. The Canucks watched Toronto and San Jose take their pick and their defenceman respectively, and the collective grief in British Columbia was palpable and real. But here is what the grieving Canucks faithful may have missed in the fog of their disappointment: Ivar Stenberg was sitting right there at third overall, and he is going to be a Vancouver Canuck, and the hockey world should be paying very close attention to what that means.
Stenberg was named SHL Rookie of the Year and Swedish Junior Hockey Player of the Year — an award previously won by Henrik and Daniel Sedin, Mattias Öhlund, and Jonathan Lekkerimäki. He won gold at the World Juniors in January. At the IIHF World Championship in May, he finished with four goals and eight points in eight games in his first major men’s national team competition, playing north of 22 minutes in three outings and sweeping the top three Swedish player awards alongside Viggo Björck and Lucas Raymond. He scored goals that made highlight packages from Zurich to Vancouver — none better than a jaw-dropping stop-and-start move that left an opposing defenceman standing still and had Canucks fans flooding social media with a single breathless message: we need this kid.
Some combination of Elias Pettersson, Marco Rossi, and Filip Chytil down the middle would provide Stenberg with excellent players to rely on as he develops. And Pettersson — the Swedish superstar, known as EP40 — skated alongside Stenberg at the World Championship and showed flashes of a connection that had scouts and fans dreaming simultaneously. Two Swedes. One city. One rebuilt franchise finding its identity again.
Stenberg is viewed by some as an alternative to McKenna for first overall, and the argument is not a crazy one. He is already playing in the best league in Europe at eighteen. His hockey IQ is off the charts. His compete level is ferocious — remember, his first shift at the World Championship ended with a thunderous hit on Darnell Nurse that had the building on its feet. He is not a passenger. He is not a project. He is a legit player.
Vancouver did not get the pick they wanted. They got the player they needed.
The Pick: Ivar Stenberg. A cornerstone for a franchise that has been searching for one. Pettersson finally has his running mate.
Pick #4 — Chicago Blackhawks
Caleb Malhotra | C | Brantford Bulldogs (OHL)
Two years ago the Chicago Blackhawks selected Connor Bedard first overall and handed a suffering franchise its first genuine reason for optimism in half a decade. Now they sit at fourth overall, and if the draft gods have any sense of narrative — and on nights like this, they always do — they are about to hand the Blackhawks another centre-ice present.
Caleb Malhotra is the best centre in this draft. It is not particularly close. The Brantford Bulldogs pivot finished the OHL season with 29 goals and 84 points in 67 games — a 1.25 points-per-game pace that translates to an NHLe of 33.2 and places him in elite company among this draft class. He is 6-foot-2, 183 pounds — already built like a pro — and his two-way game is the kind that makes coaches fall in love before he has scored a single professional goal.
Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Malhotra brings a Canadian hockey pedigree and his father Manny’s presence as a coach in the professional game adds a dimension of hockey intelligence that you cannot teach and cannot recruit. This kid has been breathing professional hockey his entire life, and it shows in the way he processes the game — always one step ahead, always in the right position, always making the read that gets his team the puck back.
Chicago picks Malhotra, and somewhere in the United Center, the lights get a little brighter. Bedard and Malhotra down the middle of a Blackhawks lineup is not a rebuild anymore. That is the beginning of something that is going to make the Western Conference very uncomfortable for a very long time.
The Pick: Caleb Malhotra. The best centre available. Chicago takes the best player on the board and does not look back.
Pick #5 — New York Rangers
Keaton Verhoeff | RD | University of North Dakota (NCAA)
And then we arrive in New York, and everything slows down just slightly — because pick five in this draft is not about the present. It is about the future. And the Rangers, sitting at fifth overall in a draft they had no business being in, are about to make a selection that will define the next era of Madison Square Garden hockey.
Keaton Verhoeff is not the finished product. He will tell you that himself, and the scouts will tell you the same thing with equal candour. But here is what he is right now, at seventeen years old, in his freshman season at the University of North Dakota: he had 20 points — six goals and 14 assists — in 36 games, which was the fourth-most by a 17-year-old defenceman in NCAA history. NHL Central Scouting raves about the way he continued to grow into his game as the season progressed, noting he has the full package of size, skills, and attributes and effectively adapted to play meaningful minutes on a North Dakota team that reached the NCAA Frozen Four.
He is 6-foot-4 and 203 pounds. He is a right-shot defenceman at a time when right-shot defencemen with elite skating and offensive upside are the most coveted assets in the sport. He notched four assists in five World Junior games for Canada. Sportsnet was asking whether Verhoeff could chase down Gavin McKenna for the top pick as recently as last August, which tells you everything you need to know about the ceiling this kid carries around with him every time he steps on the ice.
The Rangers are an interesting team with some interesting pieces. Verhoeff is going to add to that. In three years, when the current core begins its natural transition, Verhoeff will be ready. And when he is, the Rangers will have a right-shot defenceman with top-pairing potential anchoring their blue line for the better part of a decade.
New York has made smart picks before. This is one of the smart ones.
The Pick: Keaton Verhoeff. Still developing. Enormous ceiling. The cornerstone of the next era of Rangers hockey.
The Bottom Line
Five picks. Five franchises. Five players who will spend the next decade either justifying or haunting the decisions made in Buffalo on the night of June 26th. McKenna to Toronto is the coronation the hockey world has been building toward for three years. Reid gives San Jose the defensive foundation that Celebrini needs around him. Stenberg falling to Vancouver is the kind of lottery-night consolation prize that ends up feeling like a gift. Malhotra and Bedard in Chicago is a partnership that keeps the entire Western Conference up at night. And Verhoeff to New York is a long-term investment in a franchise that understands, finally, that the best time to build the future is before you need it.
June 26th is coming. Buffalo is ready. The only question is whether the rest of the hockey world is.
Prospect statistics and scouting report information sourced from NHL Central Scouting, DobberProspects, Draft Prospects Hockey, Tankathon, and The Hockey Writers. The 2026 NHL Draft takes place June 26–27 at KeyBank Center in Buffalo, New York. ENDDOC