At the NHL Draft lottery drawing, some of the league's most woeful, benighted, talent-free franchises came together to find out they'll be drafting third and later. Moving up to take the second pick in a draft class with a consensus top 2 are the San Jose Sharks, who will make their third top-2 selection in three years. And selecting first in the Gavin McKenna Sweepstakes will be the damn Toronto Maple Leafs. If the little men skating around inside your television is a TV show above all else—and it is—this is probably the most entertaining outcome we could have gotten.
The Leafs bucked the odds, entering the lottery with an 8.5 percent chance of winning the top pick, fifth-longest odds in the field. They leapfrogged some truly terrible teams, but that's the way the ping-pong ball bounces, and they'll be rewarded with McKenna, the 18-year-old Penn State forward who's been tapped as the gem of this draft class for a couple years now, and enters the league with more hype than anyone since Connor Bedard. Only morons believe draft lotteries are rigged, but if this one were, this is how they would've rigged it.
Toronto had a rough year and things have only gotten nastier in their offseason. Their GM has been on the job for one day and the local media already has the pitchforks out. Their star player, Auston Matthews, has two years left on his contract but is already telling people he isn't sure if he wants to return to the Leafs, given the hermetic state of their contending window. Landing McKenna allays the pressure on everyone for a while. A short while, given the desperation of the fandom and the proclivities of local scribes, but a while nonetheless.
The Leafs were genuinely bad this season, earning every one of their 50 losses, but they are maybe not so moribund as the teams they jumped in the lottery. It was the first time they've missed the playoffs in the last decade—and the last time that happened, they won the draft lottery too. Landing Matthews, combined with the William Nylander and Mitch Marner picks in prior years, dragged them out of the wilderness. Now there's a chance that McKenna saves a team that seemed on the decline and is without its first-round picks for the next couple years, and instantly grants them another decade of relevance. Those ping-pong balls can be heavier than they look.
McKenna will face a very different situation heading to Toronto than he might've elsewhere. On, say, Calgary he'd immediately be The Guy, but also allowed time to develop on a roster that has zero expectations for a few years. In the Leafs he joins a team with real talent. Nylander and Matthews are still in their primes. Matthew Knies is just 23. McKenna does not have to carry the scoring load here for years. On the other hand, the locals are not exactly in the business of extending grace to late bloomers—McKenna had better show something pretty quickly, or he'll learn that there are few hells hotter than that of Toronto underachievers.
So, Canucks fans aren't very happy this morning. (I imagine, anyway. They've turned off their phones.) Vancouver had the best lottery odds coming into the draw, and after one ball, and two, and three. But fair is for baseball, and foul rosters like Chicago's or New York's aren't entitled to potentially franchise-altering picks just because they stink out loud. The lottery has rewarded a team just dipping its toes into the sea of mediocrity, rather than those dwelling in its depths. Them's the breaks, sometimes.
Ah, but it's not as assured as all that, is it? There are no guarantees here; picks don't pan out; teams mismanage their good fortune. The Maple Leafs with Gavin McKenna are no sure thing, and this happy or disastrous marriage will play out under a country-sized microscope. Good or bad, it will be highly fraught, and scrutinized to the limit of what it can bear. This is, if nothing else, great TV.
