Maple Leafs, Auston Matthews and news of an unexpected lifeline

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Maple Leafs, Auston Matthews and news of an unexpected lifeline originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

The Toronto Maple Leafs and Auston Matthews got bad news on Tuesday morning when The Athletic's Chris Johnston reported that Matthews wasn't sure whether he'd be back with the Leafs in the fall.

By the end of Tuesday night, everything had changed. The NHL Draft lottery had happened. The Maple Leafs had won the No. 1 overall pick. They'd earned the chance to (probably) pick Gavin McKenna, the young Canadian phenom who just wrapped up his lone season at Penn State.

This has been a brutal year for the Maple Leafs, but this is the brightest possible light they could've found at the end of the tunnel.

From the moment Mitch Marner worked his way out of town last summer, it's been downhill. The Leafs couldn't replace him, and they stumbled and bumbled through a brutal campaign of ineffectiveness and injuries that led to a sell-off at the trade deadline and a full-scale tank down the stretch.

That got them the fifth-best lottery odds, and this time around, that was enough to luck into the first pick.

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Now, Matthews may have to reconsider.

Surely he'd want to play with a potential young superstar winger like McKenna. Imagine them on the same line. Would Matthews ask out of that?

There'll surely be a lot more reporting in the days to come on this. Someone will get at least partway to the bottom of how Matthews feels about McKenna.

But this sure is a lot different than a Toronto team with the fifth pick, or worse, a Toronto team that had conveyed its first-round pick to Boston.

Now, these Leafs can add the potential superstar McKenna. Matthews may decide that Toronto, with McKenna, is exactly where he wants to be.

More NHL news:​

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• A lesson for the Sabres from the Buffalo Bills
• This is the Maple Leafs' Cooper Flagg, LeBron James moment
• How good is Gavin McKenna?
• Canucks may have gotten 2004-level historically unlucky

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