No. 1 Pick Gavin McKenna Scores First NHL Goal as Maple Leafs Erase Three-Goal Deficit

Gavin McKenna, the 18-year-old taken first overall in June's NHL Draft, scored the first goal of his professional career on Tuesday night, helping the Toronto Maple Leafs erase a three-goal deficit and beat the Nashville Predators 5-4 in overtime at Scotiabank Arena. Auston Matthews, the last player to be drafted first overall by Toronto, set up the goal and then won the game himself 4:46 into overtime.

It was a modest moment by the standards of a hockey season — a rookie's first goal, in his team's fourth game — but it carried an unusual amount of history. McKenna had gone pointless in his NHL debut a week earlier, a 3-2 loss to Montreal in which he admitted afterward that his game was "not great." On Tuesday he recorded a point in three straight situations: an assist on John Tavares's goal, the tying goal in the second period, and an assist on Matthews's winner — a sequence that took him from a quiet start to the center of the biggest comeback Toronto has produced in nine months.

The numbers

Nashville led 3-0 less than nine minutes into the second period, built on a pair of goals from Steven Stamkos and one from Nils Hoglander. Toronto answered with five unanswered goals: Tavares at 4:56 of the second, William Nylander on the power play at 6:58, McKenna at 14:31, Jack Roslovic to tie it at 8:54 of the third, and Matthews in overtime. The final was 5-4.

• McKenna, 18 years and 290 days old, became the ninth-youngest player in Maple Leafs franchise history to score a first NHL goal, and the youngest since Luke Richardson in 1987, according to the team's official game notes.
• Matthews finished with a goal and three assists for his 18th career four-point game, passing Mitch Marner for second on Toronto's all-time list behind only Darryl Sittler. His overtime goal was the 66th game-winner of his career.
• It was the first time since January 2026 that Toronto had rallied from a three-goal deficit to win, and the team's first overtime win at home since November.
• Toronto improved to 2-2-0; Nashville, with Stamkos skating on the top line, fell to 1-1-1.

The league's own record-keepers flagged a tidier coincidence buried in the box score. Matthews's assist on McKenna's goal marked the ninth time in NHL history that a first-overall draft pick has set up another first-overall pick's first career goal — the last instance came in October 2023, when Taylor Hall assisted Connor Bedard's first goal for Chicago. And because Tavares, a former No. 1 pick himself, factored into McKenna's first point minutes earlier, McKenna became only the second player in league history to have both his first point and his first goal assisted by former first-overall selections while being one himself. The only other player it happened to, per NHL statistics cited in the team's game notes, was Stamkos — who was on the opposing bench Tuesday night.

How McKenna got here

McKenna, from Whitehorse, Yukon, arrived in Toronto with as much advance billing as any prospect in recent memory. He put up 244 points in 133 games over three seasons with the Medicine Hat Tigers of the Western Hockey League, then skipped a path that almost no top prospect takes — a single season of U.S. college hockey, at Penn State, where he scored 51 points in 35 games as an 18-year-old playing against men several years older. Toronto, which finished 28th overall but won the draft lottery, used the top pick on him in June, General Manager John Chayka calling him "an exceptional young man with tremendous talent and character," and the club signed him to a three-year entry-level contract within days.

The comparisons to Matthews were immediate and, for a while, uninvited. Matthews was also taken first overall by Toronto, a decade earlier, and famously scored four goals in his first NHL game in 2016 — a debut still regarded as one of the most dramatic in league history. McKenna's own debut carried no such fireworks: in the opening loss to Montreal he was held off the scoresheet, finished minus-2, and gave a blunt self-assessment to reporters afterward.

"Not great," McKenna said after his NHL debut. "I had a couple turnovers ... I'm glad we're playing again tomorrow so I can bounce back and regroup."

Coach Jim Hiller, who put McKenna on a line with Tavares and Nylander from the start of training camp, had already seen enough in practice to defend the pairing. Watching McKenna work against veteran defenseman Chris Tanev in a camp scrimmage, Hiller said the rookie's instincts stood out: "I saw him dance away and just do a nice little backhand sauce pass into space — that jumps out at you. That's what he's going to have to be able to do against veteran NHL defensemen when the real games start."

Who is affected

For Toronto, the stakes extend well past one October box score. The Maple Leafs have spent most of the past decade built around Matthews, Nylander and Mitch Marner — Marner has since left as a free agent — without reaching a conference final, and the organization's decision to hand its most hyped prospect in a generation a top-line role as an 18-year-old is itself a bet on how quickly a rebuild-on-the-fly can pay off. A scoreless debut followed six days later by a highlight-reel night does not settle that question, but it gives the front office its first piece of in-season evidence.

For Nashville, the result drops the club to 1-1-1 to open the season. The Predators led by three goals in the second period and still lost, a collapse that will draw scrutiny regardless of how early it is in the schedule. Stamkos, at 36, remains capable of scoring in bunches — his two goals, including a power-play strike, were the most notable positive the Predators could point to afterward — but the rest of the lineup could not hold the lead he and his teammates had built.

What happens next

Toronto opens a three-game road trip Thursday night against the Vegas Golden Knights, followed by stops in Colorado and Utah, a stretch that will offer an early measure of whether the comeback against Nashville reflects a deeper identity or a single good night. McKenna is expected to remain on the top line between Tavares and Nylander barring a change from Hiller. For Nashville, which sits at 1-1-1 through three games, Tuesday's collapse from a three-goal lead is the more pressing early-season question, regardless of Stamkos's individual form.

Neither the first goal nor the four-point night will be remembered on their own as decisive moments in a long season. But for a league that has spent more than a year building anticipation around McKenna's arrival, Tuesday supplied the first tangible evidence — tying the previous No. 1 pick to the newest one, on the same ice, in the same game.