There’s so much hype around Gavin McKenna that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s only 17 years old.
The freshman winger has been projected to be the top overall pick in the 2026 NHL Entry Draft since he announced his commitment to Penn State live on ESPN this past summer, purportedly after the Nittany Lions offered McKenna a package worth $700,000.
McKenna shoulders expectations and scrutiny usually reserved for guys who have already signed their NHL contracts, not guys 11 weeks into their first semester of college.
At a press conference in mid-October, though, Penn State coach Guy Gadowsky said that “no one handles the noise and the changes better” than McKenna, which is one of the many things the kid’s got going for him.
He’s a young man who’s exceptionally good at hockey, too, but he’s a little over a month away from his 18th birthday, and he’s attending college so far from home that traveling the distance between State College, Pa., and Whitehorse, Yukon, requires at least three commercial flights or an overland drive of nearly 60 hours.
Maybe that’s why what McKenna says that he likes the most about college so far is so heartening. “I like how close all the guys are.”
The guys, of course, are his teammates, and McKenna means both proximity and emotion. “Campus is not huge, so you can walk to your buddy’s house,” he said, adding that he has teammates that live in his apartment building, making it easy to hit their floor “and go hang out with them.”
“It’s nice to be around your team all the time,” he said. “I think that brings your team closer.”
And McKenna’s all about the team. Gadowsky said that one of the things that impressed him when McKenna was considering Penn State was McKenna’s emphasis on the Nittany Lions rather than himself. “When we were talking about what would happen if he did commit here, he always reverted back to talking about the team.”
McKenna said that he liked “the team they have here, seeing what they did” last season. “Going to the Frozen Four last year excited me,” said McKenna. “Seeing that they had a lot of returns coming back, I wanted to play with some of those guys.”
Perhaps Penn State’s 2025 Frozen Four semifinal loss to Boston University felt like a familiar kind of unfinished business to McKenna because his own team fell short at the end of last season. After winning the 2024-25 Western Hockey League championship, the Medicine Hat Tigers lost in the 2025 Canadian Hockey League (CHL) Memorial Cup finals.
McKenna began his CHL career after the Tigers chose him first overall in the 2022 WHL draft. He was 14 years old. McKenna played most of the 2022-23 season for South Alberta Hockey Academy, a member of the Canadian Sports School Hockey League (CSSHL U18), where he distinguished himself representing Yukon in the Canada Winter Games, scoring 16 goals with 15 assists in seven games.
At the end of his first full year with Medicine Hat, he was named the 2024 WHL and CHL Rookie of the Year. With 41 goals and 88 assists last season, McKenna earned WHL and CHL Player-of-the-Year honors. In 162 total career WHL games, McKenna had 94 goals and 201 assists.
Before the start of this season, Gadowsky said that McKenna “does think the game differently” and added, “He’s a different animal when it comes to that, not only compared to any other freshman but compared to anybody.”
When the season was four games old, Gadowsky said that McKenna can “find every lane, manipulate time and space.”
With three goals and 10 assists and tied for the lead among freshmen point earners in his first month of NCAA play, McKenna was the October Hockey Commissioners Association Rookie of the Month. McKenna helped the Nittany Lions to a 9-1-0 start to the season, and his 13 points tied him for 10th in among scorers nationally in October.
Gadowsky has said that with McKenna, the focus won’t be so much coaching the future NHLer’s play as it will be helping him develop. To Gadowsky, that development includes encouraging McKenna’s creativity. To McKenna, that means hitting the gym.
“I’ve been putting on some weight,” said McKenna. “It’s given me confidence on the ice to start getting into battles and stuff like that and not shying away from hits. I think that’s been a big step for me.” It’s something he “wants to develop even more” in the future, he says.
Gadowsky has commented on McKenna’s “chill” off-ice persona, calling the freshman an “easy hang” and “really polite,” remarking on how easily the freshman has fit into the Nittany Lions’ locker room. No one who knows McKenna is surprised by how well he’s liked, or by how much he values the company of his teammates. He’s been a leader on every team he’s played with previously, but it’s more than that.
It’s more than his considerable talent. It’s more than his respectful demeanor.
For McKenna, it’s a family-first mindset, the driving factor behind his success.
“My grandpa,” said McKenna, “he went to residential school and the stuff he went through, to see how far he’s come is pretty motivating for me.”
McKenna is a member of the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation of the Hän, a culture that has lived along the Yukon River for thousands of years. McKenna’s grandfather, Joe Mason, came through Canada’s residential schools, a system that forcibly separated indigenous children from their families in for more than 100 years, ending only in the 1990s. In 2015, the Canadian government concluded that the system perpetuated cultural genocide. Countless children in residential schools were abused and thousands died.
“It makes you want to do it for him,” he said. “I just want to make sure I’m representing my people in a good way, being a good role model for them.”
McKenna has been called a generational talent. At just 17 years old, he may be redefining what people think that concept means.