Sharks Hijacked the 2026 NHL Draft. Toronto Just Got Its Next Auston Matthews.

BUFFALO — The moment Keaton Verhoeff’s name was still on the board at No. 9, San Jose Sharks general manager Mike Grier allowed himself something close to disbelief.

Verhoeff, the North Dakota defenseman widely considered one of the three best players in the entire 2026 draft class, had slipped past six teams who could have taken him. The Sharks, who had already selected dynamic Swedish winger Ivar Stenberg with the second overall pick, grabbed Verhoeff with the ninth — a selection acquired from Ottawa in exchange for forward William Eklund — and suddenly owned two of what scouts called the class’s three elite talents.

They were not finished. Later in the first round, San Jose added Ryan Lin at No. 21, a defender drawing comparisons to Winnipeg’s Josh Morrissey, after flipping picks 27, 62, and 120 to Philadelphia to move up. Three first-round selections. Two projected top-three talents. One organizational blueprint rewritten in a single evening at KeyBank Center.

“Some draft classes become the backbone of an organizational turnaround,” one Eastern Conference scout told ESPN on Friday night. The Sharks may have found theirs.

But the name everyone came to Buffalo to hear belonged to someone else. Pop star Justin Bieber, a die-hard Maple Leafs fan, walked to the podium inside the same arena where Toronto selected Auston Matthews first overall in 2016 and announced Gavin McKenna as the No. 1 pick in the 2026 Upper Deck NHL Draft. The 18-year-old from Whitehorse, Yukon, becomes the third player in Maple Leafs franchise history taken first overall, joining Matthews and Wendel Clark in 1985.

McKenna’s college season at Penn State was the kind that makes scouts stop hedging. He won the Big Ten scoring title as a freshman with 38 points in 24 conference games, and his eight-point performance against Ohio State on Feb. 20 was the most in a single NCAA Division I game in 39 years. Seven assists in that game alone had not been matched since 1983. He finished the season with 51 points — 15 goals, 36 assists — in 35 games and added 14 points in seven contests for Canada’s bronze-medal squad at the World Junior Championship.

“Obviously he’s on the first line. I’m going to have to prove myself to be able to play with a player like that,” McKenna said of Matthews, grinning through the kind of nerves that come with being the most scrutinized teenager in Canadian hockey. “My game’s obviously a playmaker, he’s a shooter, so I think we could complement each other pretty well.”

Toronto general manager John Chayka, who had spent the combine process keeping his cards close, called McKenna “an exceptional young man with tremendous talent and character” and said each interaction with the family “strengthened our belief in him as both a player and a person.” The non-answer that had defined Chayka’s pre-draft posture was gone. He had his franchise forward.

What made the first round so volatile, though, was the trade volume. The Anaheim Ducks entered Friday as a playoff team and left lighter. Mason McTavish, a former third overall pick and Team Canada captain, was dealt to the St. Louis Blues for the 15th and 29th selections. Ducks general manager Pat Verbeek acknowledged the weight of the move. “It wasn’t an easy decision. I lingered over it for a couple weeks,” he said. “When Klepov was there, that really helped us make the decision.” Anaheim used the 15th pick on Russian winger Nikita Klepov and took Swedish defenseman Marcus Nordmark at 29.

Anaheim also shipped defenseman Olen Zellweger to the Buffalo Sabres for prospect Anton Wahlberg and a second-round pick, a move that stripped a significant piece from the blue line of a team that had been trying to push forward. Two meaningful roster players gone. Two first-round picks and some futures acquired. Whether that math balances depends on what Klepov and Nordmark become — which is another way of saying nobody can answer that question for three years.

The Vegas Golden Knights, operating in a different window entirely, sent forward Pavel Dorofeyev to the New York Rangers for the 26th pick, the 92nd selection, and a conditional 2028 first-rounder. The Rangers, contending now, added a scoring winger without touching their prospect pipeline. Vegas, recalibrating after an early playoff exit, stockpiled draft capital. The conditional first in 2028 is the piece that could define or haunt that trade depending on where the Rangers finish that season.

Behind the marquee picks, the draft’s middle rounds carried their own weight. Vancouver took Caleb Malhotra third overall, giving the Canucks a center with a famous hockey surname — his father, Manny Malhotra, spent 16 NHL seasons in the league and now serves as an assistant coach in Toronto. Buffalo selected defenseman Daxon Rudolph fourth. The top eight was defense-heavy, with the Rangers taking Latvian blueliner Alberts Šmits fifth, Calgary grabbing Carson Carels sixth, and Seattle picking Chase Reid seventh before Winnipeg went with undersized Swedish center Viggo Björck at eight.

Chicago, which had traded its original first-round pick to the Sabres in a deal for Bowen Byram and Jordan Greenway, moved back into the second round by sending picks 37 and 119 to New Jersey for the 35th selection. The Blackhawks’ draft board was reactive from the start — a consequence of the Byram deal that left them without first-round ammunition in a class this deep.

The Pittsburgh Penguins found a feel-good story at No. 22, selecting right winger Liam Ruck of the Medicine Hat Tigers. His twin brother Markus had been hoping to join him. Whether Pittsburgh finds a way to reunite them in later rounds or at development camp will be a question that writes itself through the summer.

And then there was the seventh round, where San Jose made history a second time. With pick No. 201, the Sharks selected Alexander Karmanov, a 7-foot-1 defenseman who became the tallest player ever drafted and the first Moldovan-born skater selected in the NHL’s annual draft. He is a project. He is also unforgettable.

The question that will define this draft class is whether San Jose’s three-pick haul translates into the kind of core that can pull a franchise out of the league’s basement. Stenberg at 2, Verhoeff at 9, Lin at 21 — that is a foundation, not a collection. Whether Grier builds around it or on top of it will depend on what happens between now and the trade deadline, and on whether these prospects are given the development runway their talent justifies.

Toronto got the name. San Jose may have gotten the draft.