While the Carolina Hurricanes were enjoying the longest playoff respite in NHL history, Gavin McKenna was doing a little decompressing of his own before things got really goofy busy.

He and his family loaded up the motorhome and headed to the lake – there are plenty of them where he's from – for a little hiking, fishing, ATV riding and just letting the sun hit his face. And there's lots of it. At this time of year in the Yukon, it comes up at about five in the morning and doesn't go down until around 11 at night.

With his hockey season over and the NHL draft looming, McKenna was in that weird time warp in mid-May where there was a lot to anticipate and, for him at least, a few things to escape.

It has been a strange season for the kid who was the shoo-in for first overall in the 2026 draft until he wasn't – ultimately going to the Toronto Maple Leafs at No. 1 anyway. 

McKenna could have stayed with the WHL's Medicine Hat Tigers this season, scored 200 points and, perhaps, gone to a second consecutive Memorial Cup.

But instead, he took the $700,000 in NIL (name, image and likeness) money that Penn State offered him and challenged himself against older, better players.

And as is often the case with kids who show so much promise early in their careers, by the time they get to their draft year, it seems the same people who spent all their time building them up want to do nothing more than nitpick and question their games.

Some of them even remove their bunny slippers, leave their parents' basements and go touch grass occasionally.

"That first half of the season was tough," McKenna said. "My whole career, I was getting my tires pumped up on social media, and this was the first year I've gotten some backlash. I tried to ignore it, but you see things and hear things. I had a great year in the 'Dub' last year, and it's almost like people totally forgot about it. A lot of people seem to be in the moment."

The adjustment part of it actually didn't come as a surprise to McKenna.

When he left his hometown of Whitehorse at 12 to play at the RINK Hockey Academy in Kelowna, B.C., he broke both his hands within weeks of one another.

Always playing above his age group, McKenna encountered obstacles at every step, and, like the great ones always do, he managed to figure it out. See if you notice a pattern here:

• After 18 points in 16 games as a 15-year-old for Medicine Hat in 2022-23, McKenna looked at his scoring totals early the next season before going home for Christmas and wasn't happy – even though he had 11 goals and 32 points in 26 games.

"He basically said, 'That's not good enough. I have to be better than that,' " said Tigers coach Willie Desjardins. "He started watching video on his own, and he skated himself really hard after practice. And he was good. I wasn't mad at him or anything. It was more of him saying it wasn't good enough by his standards, and he took charge of it and was better."

In the month of January, McKenna scored 10 goals and 29 points in 12 games, good enough to lead the league, and finished 2023-24 with 34 goals and 97 points as a 16-year-old. He went from 1.23 points per game before the Christmas break to 1.86 per game in the second half of the season.

• When he arrived back in Medicine Hat after the 2025 World Junior Championship the next season, McKenna was not a particularly happy young man.

He had scored on the first rebound of his first shot in the first period of his first game, then didn't hit the scoresheet again, save for a 10-minute misconduct at the buzzer of Canada's shocking 4-3 loss to Czechia in the quarterfinal.

He was misused, miscast and played with players who didn't complement his skills. He got emotional after one of Canada's worst WJC showings in history and felt he had let his country down.

When he left for the 2025 WJC, McKenna was sitting at 19 goals and 60 points in 30 games and riding a 14-game point streak. From the time he returned through to the WHL playoffs and the Memorial Cup, he failed to record a point in just two games and put up 34 goals and 113 points in his next 46 games.

• After joining Penn State, McKenna got out of the gate with a respectable four goals and 16 points in 15 games. But it was seen by many in the hockey world as an underwhelming total.

In the second half of the season, though, there might not have been a better NCAA player than McKenna, as evidenced by the fact he started the season as a 17-year-old and ended it as a finalist for the Hobey Baker Award.

He had 11 goals and 35 points in 20 games, including an eight-point game in February.

Despite losing linemates for long periods of time and having to play with a variety of players, McKenna found his game in the second half and went on a serious heater.

"What is really amazing to me is that he put up those numbers while playing with about 10 different linemates all over the place," said Penn State coach Guy Gadowsky. "He just did a tremendous job, and I've never seen anything in college hockey like what he did in the second half of the season. He really dominated in a way that I have never seen."

So what do we make of McKenna, the distant non-blood relative of Connor Bedard through marriage? Is he Patrick Kane, Nikita Kucherov or Clayton Keller? Is the legal situation he found himself in a red flag? Is he even going to go first in 2026?

There was so much drama in one year, but that comes with the territory when you're viewed as the draft's best prospect.

He scored 14 points at the WJC and somehow came out of the event with people thinking his stock had dropped.

He put on a show at Penn State's outdoor game, then ended up punching a fellow student after the student in question allegedly pursued him and his family both inside and outside a campus bar/restaurant and said some disparaging things about his mother.

And despite his big season, Penn State lost in the Big Ten semifinal and the first round of the NCAA tournament.

Through it all, Gadowsky said he never saw McKenna get down or complain about his lot. In fact, he was happiest when people weren't talking about him.

"He doesn't like it when things are about him," Gadowsky said. "He really doesn't. When we went anywhere as a team, he was the first guy to take off his hat, the first guy to go shake someone's hand and the first guy to push his chair in. He's a very polite, very respectful, well-mannered guy."

And with respect to the charges of misdemeanor simple assault and two summary offenses – one count of disorderly conduct and one count of harassment – (the felony aggravated-assault charge was withdrawn) stemming from the bar altercation, Gadowsky said McKenna maintained the same demeanor with his teammates before the incident that he did after.

"He had no problem, because he knows he acted according to his family values," Gadowsky said. "He was very comfortable with that. This was new to me and new to our program, and we learned so much from Gavin about how to handle noise. He's been Gavin McKenna for a long time, and it's very natural to him, but we learned a lot. He does not let anybody else's opinion bother him."

One of the first things McKenna did this year was delete most of his social-media accounts, but you still hear things.

The start of this season was really a bit of a slog for McKenna.

One of the reasons he was looking forward to playing at Penn State was the chance to play with his buddy, Nashville Predators prospect Aiden Fink, but Fink was injured for most of the first half. His cast of linemates seemingly changed from game to game, which made it hard to develop any continuity. And he learned that he was no longer in the WHL, where he could have the puck pretty much whenever he wanted it and could play the game on his terms.

Then the presumptive No. 1 pick started to develop challengers, chief among them Ivar Stenberg, whose Swedish team won the WJC title while Canada finished third.

"Once the world juniors came, and I got to play with some amazing players, I got my confidence back, and during the second half, I figured things out," McKenna said. "I'm confident in myself, and when I'm playing with smart hockey players, I'm at my best. That's why I'm really looking forward to playing with the best players in the world."

The thing about that is, though, you're also playing against the best players in the world, and that can be a huge adjustment.

In his first season in the NHL, Joe Thornton had seven points in 55 games. Yes, you read that correctly.

During his freshman campaign, Brendan Shanahan was asked by an opponent just before a faceoff how things were going for him.

"Not too good," Shanahan said. "I'm tied with Ron Hextall in goals."

Steven Stamkos regularly played fewer than 10 minutes a night in the first half of his rookie season.

So there could very well be another adjustment period with the Maple Leafs. But McKenna has figured things out every step of the way, and there's zero reason to believe that will not be the case in the NHL.

Offensively and creatively, there is nothing McKenna doesn't do well. You can nitpick his defensive awareness and play away from the puck, but those things can be taught.

Vision, poise and an ability to elevate teammates are more innate qualities. His past suggests he'll be more of a playmaker than a pure goal-scorer – unless, of course, he develops a little more selfishness.

TSN director of scouting Craig Button noticed that many of McKenna's passes would "go into a black hole" this season and thinks McKenna's totals would have been better had he not deferred to his linemates.

The words "magician" and "wizard" have been used ad nauseam to describe McKenna's play with the puck, and they're actually not being thrown around lightly.

Had McKenna stayed in Medicine Hat this season, it would have been a case of him playing 3-D chess while everyone else was playing Go Fish.

The same poise and calm he showed this season when things got difficult are what he brings to the game. The way he sees the ice with the puck on his stick is not something that many players have. And as is the case with every elite player, McKenna possesses a hunger to put in the work to get better, and coaches have long marvelled at his need to stay on the ice until he masters a task.

"He's a lot more than just an offensive genius," Gadowsky said. "He led our team in takeaways, and I don't think a lot of people realize that. And the backhand of his stick is amazing. In fact, I don't think he even has a backhand. He has two forehands. He'll send a bullet backhand sauce pass right on someone's tape, and you're like, 'Wow, that was a lucky play.' But then he does it five more times."

Compliments are welcome, even backhanded ones. McKenna might have turned off his DMs when things got hypercritical this season, but on the other hand, everyone likes to hear nice things about themselves.

McKenna has enough perspective to know that all of this, with the exception of the very serious legal situation, is a bunch of white noise and that the proof will not be in when he gets drafted but what he accomplishes as an NHL player.

And he gets that perspective by going back home to a place that is comfortable and warm – even though temperatures aren't far above freezing in the spring.

It's a place that holds a deep connection for McKenna, who is a proud member of the Tr'ondek Hwech'in (translated as People of the Klondike River) First Nation, descended from his maternal grandfather, Joe Mason, a residential-school survivor who later became a five-time amateur boxing champion in the Yukon.

McKenna heartily embraces his First Nations heritage and is thankful for the place he calls home.

"I love the Yukon, and anyone I've ever brought up here falls in love with it," he said. "It's a beautiful place, and people here have been amazing to me.

"Growing up, it wasn't cheap to fly down south every weekend to find competition. The community sponsored me, and we had lots of family friends chipping in money to help. I love this place. I love all of it and just getting outside."

This feature appeared in The Hockey News' Draft Preview issue featuring Gavin McKenna on the cover.

Not only does it feature scouting reports on the NHL draft's top 100 prospects, but it also goes further into the stories of some of the top players available, such as McKenna, Ivar Stenberg, Keaton Verhoeff, Carson Carels, JP Hurlbert and the Ruck twins.

There are also team-by-team reports that cover immediate and long-term needs, cap situation, players in the system, shrewd picks from the past and not so shrewd picks. It's worth a read during and after the draft.