McKenna is still the consensus No. 1 overall pick.<\/p>\n
NHL.com <\/a>and The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler <\/a>both have Toronto selecting the Canadian forward out of Penn State. <\/p>\n San Jose’s pick at No. 2 is where the debate begins. Wheeler has Swedish winger Ivar Stenberg landing there, while NHL.com’s pair of experts have defenseman Chase Reid going to the Sharks. <\/p>\n San Jose has a terrific young forward group, led by Macklin Celebrini, and while another forward would be great, it needs more talent on the blue line.<\/p>\n This is the perfect opportunity for the Sharks to land a top-tier prospect in defense to partner with Celebrini, Will Smith and Co.<\/p>\n The No. 3 pick seems obvious for the Vancouver Canucks. Caleb Malhotra is the pick across the board. Malhotra’s dad, Manny, was just named the Canucks head coach. That could play a factor in the selection.<\/p>\n Stenberg dropped to the Chicago Blackhawks at No. 4 in NHL.com’s most-recent mock draft. <\/p>\n Wheeler placed defenseman Carson Carels with Chicago and then Reid at No. 5 to the New York Rangers. <\/p>\n Carels was mocked to the Rangers by NHL.com, so there is a pretty good idea that McKenna, Reid, Carels, Stenberg and Malhotra will be the top five picks in some order. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McKenna is still the consensus No. 1 overall pick. NHL.com and The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler both have Toronto…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":725193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-725192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725192\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/725193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}