Damien Cox: Sidney Crosby saved a franchise. Guy Lafleur replaced a legend. Gavin McKenna just has to play hockey - Toronto Star

No other No. 1 draft pick has entered the NHL with a softer cushion than the Maple Leafs phenom.

Gavin McKenna, drafted first overall by the Maple Leafs in June, arrives without the pressure previous No. 1 NHL picks have faced.

Damien Cox is a former Star sports reporter who is a current freelance contributing columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @DamoSpin.

If Gavin McKenna needs to bend the ear of someone who can share insights on the unique experience of being the first pick in the NHL draft, he won’t have far to look.

He can go up to the Maple Leafs executive suite and chat with Mats Sundin (Quebec Nordiques, 1989). He can look down the bench and ask for a moment with Auston Matthews (Toronto, 2016) or get up in the morning and have coffee with John Tavares (New York Islanders, 2009), who is generously letting McKenna share his home.

McKenna could even get in touch with Wendel Clark (Toronto, 1985), who still works for the Leafs as a community rep. That’s a lot of specific institutional knowledge: four individuals who were drafted No. 1 and became prominent NHLers.

All four, however, entered the NHL in much more difficult situations than McKenna.

Sundin’s Nordiques were terrible and badly run; Eric Lindros refused to play for them, and the club moved to Denver six years after Sundin was drafted. Matthews and Clark joined the NHL’s worst team. Tavares went to a 61-point Islanders team that wouldn’t make the playoffs for another three years.

McKenna, meanwhile, won’t face anything quite like that in his first NHL season.

In fact, you could argue it is the cushiest arrival of any No. 1 pick since 1970, when the NHL draft became truly universal.

Think about it. He’s already surrounded with more mature, world-class talent than Sundin, Clark, Matthews or Tavares were. His first linemates at camp were Tavares (1,266 games, 525 goals) and William Nylander (750 games, 292 goals).

Matthews is a former 69-goal scorer. Sergei Bobrovsky is a goaltender bound for the Hall of Fame. Morgan Rielly is going into his 14th year. Darren Raddysh was one of the NHL’s best offensive defencemen in Tampa last season. This is not a horrible roster.

Yes, the Leafs were bad last season and underachieved terribly, but their lousiness wasn’t primarily because of a lack of talent. There were a host of on-ice and internal problems that contributed to a lost campaign. McKenna won’t be asked to play saviour, and he will get to play with more talent than the norm for first overall picks.

Compare his situation to Connor Bedard. Drafted No. 1 by the Chicago Blackhawks in 2023, Bedard is heading into his fourth NHL season having yet to play a playoff game. Only one teammate, Tyler Bertuzzi, scored more than 20 goals last season. The Hawks had to bring back 37-year-old Patrick Kane just to give Bedard a noteworthy player to skate with.

Macklin Celebrini didn’t have a single teammate with 60 points in his first season in San Jose. That’s the way it works most of the time: the top pick goes to a team down on its luck and is surrounded with little established talent.

There have been exceptions. After the strange COVID season and an even stranger lottery, Alexis Lafrenière went first in a mediocre 2020 draft to a pretty good New York Rangers team. But those were unusual circumstances.

Guy Lafleur went first to the Stanley Cup champion Montreal Canadiens in 1971, after general manager Sam Pollock fleeced California for the top pick, and joined a roster littered with future Hall of Fame inductees. Still, Lafleur struggled for several seasons at least partly because of overwhelming pressure to become the team’s next French-Canadian superstar; classy captain Jean Béliveau had just retired.

“Everyone was expecting Guy to replace Jean, which was impossible,” Hall of Fame coach Scotty Bowman said in an NHL.com interview.

Sidney Crosby, meanwhile, joined Pittsburgh as the first pick in 2005. The Penguins already had Mark Recchi, Sergei Gonchar, Brooks Orpik and Marc-André Fleury with Evgeni Malkin on the way. So, Crosby had talent to play with.

On the other hand, the Penguins had also gone bankrupt seven years earlier and were still teetering on the edge of insolvency. A new arena was desperately needed, and Crosby’s excellence ultimately helped deliver one by 2010.

By comparison, the expectations McKenna is facing are much, much less. You could argue McKenna faced more pressure last season when he made the unprecedented jump from the Medicine Hat juniors to Penn State University.

This is not to say it will be easy.  Toronto can be an uncomfortable market for some, even these days when young players are easily shielded from media attention. The biggest challenges may be staying off social media and NHL-promoted gambling sites, which exist equally in all markets.

McKenna will also need time. But the Leafs should play more of a puck-possession style under head coach Jim Hiller. They are one of the NHL’s richest franchises. McKenna, finally, isn’t being asked to save the franchise or be its best player.

It’s probably the most comfortable situation any No. 1 NHL pick has ever walked into.

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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

Damien Cox is a former Star sports reporter who is a current freelance contributing columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @DamoSpin.