The Hockey World Just Stopped: Toronto Wins the 2026 NHL Draft Lottery
Published May 5, 2026
It happened tonight in Secaucus, New Jersey, and no one saw it coming.
In one of the most stunning draft lottery results in NHL history, the Toronto Maple Leafs, a team with just an 8.5% chance of winning the first overall pick defied every probability model, every mock draft, and every reasonable expectation to win the 2026 NHL Draft Lottery. The San Jose Sharks, working with a mere 5.3% chance, jumped to second overall. And the Vancouver Canucks, the team with the best odds in the field at 25.5%, the team that endured the single worst season in the NHL this year, fell to third.
Put down whatever you are holding. Read that again.
The Maple Leafs are on the clock. Gavin McKenna is coming to Toronto.
How We Got Here
The Vancouver Canucks just finished the worst season in the NHL, winning only 25 games and finishing dead last in the standings. They earned the best lottery odds available — 25.5% — the reward for an absolute disaster of a year. For a franchise that has never picked first overall in its 56-year history, this was supposed to be the night that drought finally ended.
The Toronto Maple Leafs, meanwhile, missed the playoffs for the first time in a decade. The slide cost former GM Brad Treliving his job, and the organization brought in John Chayka and the legendary Mats Sundin to rebuild what had become a franchise adrift. They entered the lottery as the fifth-best odds team with an 8.5% chance. The math said they probably weren’t walking away with the top pick. The math was catastrophically wrong.
When the last ball fell, and the Maple Leafs’ were standing there holding the number, the studio in Secaucus paused for just a half-second…. and then the hockey world exploded. Sundin, the Leafs icon whose No. 13 hangs from the rafters of Scotiabank Arena, was beaming at the podium. In a building full of stoic executives trained to give nothing away, even the suits couldn’t hide it.
Then came the second draw. Vancouver, desperate to hold at least second overall, watched the San Jose Sharks, working with just 5.3% odds, leap over them to claim the No. 2 pick. The Canucks will pick third. The worst team in hockey walks away from the lottery without a top-two pick for the first time in memory.
What Toronto Just Won
Let’s be clear about what this means. The Maple Leafs now hold the right to select Gavin McKenna, and there is very little reason to think they will do anything else.
McKenna, the 18-year-old forward from Whitehorse, Yukon, is ranked first overall by the majority of every major scouting service in North America — No. 1 on NHL Central Scouting’s final ranking of North American skaters, No. 1 on TSN, No. 1 at Daily Faceoff, No. 1 at McKeen’s Hockey, and No. 1 on EliteProspects. In his final WHL season with the Medicine Hat Tigers, he posted 41 goals and 88 assists for 129 points in 56 games, good for second in the entire league — and his 54-game point streak is a modern CHL record dating back to 2000. He was named the CHL and WHL Player of the Year.
This past season, he left Medicine Hat and enrolled at Penn State University, a decision that sent shockwaves through Canadian junior hockey, and immediately became the most dynamic player in the Big Ten. He set nine program records, became the first Penn State player to win the Big Ten Scoring Championship, was named Big Ten Freshman of the Year, and finished the year as a Hobey Baker Award Top-10 Finalist. He averaged 1.46 points per game, second in the entire NCAA, and in 35 games. He was, in short, everything advertised.
Now he most likely heads to a Toronto lineup that already features Auston Matthews and William Nylander. McKenna will be paired with the Leafs’ last first overall pick. Let that sink in.
The Vancouver Nightmare
Somewhere in Vancouver tonight, a city is processing grief. Are they in fact cursed?
The Canucks have never picked first overall. They have picked second four times — Daniel Sedin, Petr Nedved, Trevor Linden, Dale Tallon…. and they have a complicated, often painful relationship with the draft lottery. Tonight added another chapter to a story that Canucks fans have been living in one form or another for decades.
They endured a season from hell. They finished last in the league. They had the best odds. They did everything that is supposed to give you a chance at this, and then the ping-pong balls went the way of the Maple Leafs and the Sharks — two teams with a combined odds of roughly 13% for the top two picks.
To be beaten twice in the same lottery night, leapfrogged first for first overall and then for second overall, is the kind of thing that sounds like a made-up punchline. For Vancouver fans, it is simply another Tuesday.
They will pick third. There is still genuine talent available. The 2026 class has depth at the top with elite defencemen like Chase Reid of the Soo Greyhounds and Carson Carels of the Prince George Cougars drawing strong interest, along with Swedish forward Ivar Stenberg, who some scouts actually have ranked above McKenna. Third overall is not a consolation prize in a class this deep. But it is not Gavin McKenna. And tonight, after everything the Canucks and their fans endured this season, that stings in a way that only hockey can deliver.
San Jose’s Quiet Coup
Lost in the noise of the Toronto celebration and the Vancouver heartbreak is the very real fact that the San Jose Sharks just had an exceptional night.
The Sharks have missed the playoffs for seven consecutive seasons. They are rebuilding around Macklin Celebrini, the first overall pick from 2024, and now they add the second pick in one of the deepest drafts in recent memory. Whether they use that pick on Stenberg, Verhoeff, Reid, Carels, or someone else entirely, San Jose now has a genuine foundation to build something meaningful. Celebrini plus a top-two pick, plus the development of their prospect pool, the Sharks are further along than their recent record suggests.
The Bigger Picture
The 2026 NHL Draft is scheduled for June 26 and 27 at the KeyBank Center in Buffalo, New York. Between now and then, the hockey world will debate endlessly, should Toronto take McKenna? Is Stenberg actually the better fit? What does Vancouver do at three?
But tonight is not about analysis. Tonight is about the chaos and the beauty of what makes the draft lottery one of the most genuinely unpredictable events in professional sport. A team with an 8.5% chance just won the whole thing. The worst team in hockey fell to third. A franchise that hasn’t made noise in years quietly grabbed one of the most valuable assets in the game.
The Maple Leafs wanted Mats Sundin to bring them luck. As it turns out, the legend still has the touch.
Buckle up, Buffalo. June cannot come soon enough.
– By Nathan Add – The Add List +