Reach or not, the Toronto Maple Leafs were committed to drafting Easton Cowan in first round

Matt Larkin
Matt Larkin(MLarkinHockey)
Reach or not, the Toronto Maple Leafs were committed to drafting Easton Cowan in first round
Credit: Easton Cowan (© Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports)

NASHVILLE – A little on the nose, Mitch.

Easton Cowan, a somewhat undersized London Knight, is a creative forward with smooth hands and a competitiveness that suits him for all situations. The makeup already sounded similar to Mitch Marner’s, and the comparisons made even more sense when the Toronto Maple Leafs chose Cowan with the 28th overall pick of the 2023 NHL Draft on Wednesday night.

That’s when Marner just leaned into it. Almost right after Cowan got selected, Marner picked up the phone and FaceTimed him. Cowan’s favorite player as a kid, by the way? Marner.

“That was pretty cool,” Cowan said. “He always competes all over the ice. He’s a great player, he’s a great guy and you look up to that. He was just really happy. He said I can’t wait to meet you, happy you’re part of the Buds, and we talked about London. It was awesome. I was in shock.”

If we’re all being honest with ourselves: Cowan wasn’t the only person in shock when Toronto called his name at pick 28. Far from it. Pretty much every prominent draft ranker and prognosticator’s jaw hit the floor. Easton who? Daily Faceoff’s prospect analyst Steven Ellis ranked Cowan 78th going into the Draft. The ranker consensus on Elite Prospects, which aggregates more than a dozen experts from different publications, gave Cowan an average ranking of 70th. Some experts had him as low as 118th, only one had him inside the top 50, and none rated him as a first-round pick.

So why – and how – did the end up a first-rounder?

From a hockey standpoint, it was all about peaking late. During the Toronto scouting staff’s draft research, they consulted analytics firms who suggested Cowan’s all-around impact gave him the best numbers in the OHL in the second half of the season, after he’d earned coach Dale Hunter’s trust and worked his way up to the top line. The season stat line of 20 goals and 53 points in 68 games doesn’t exactly pop for a first-liner in major junior, but zoom in on the stretch run and you get 29 points in his final 30 games, including six goals and 17 points in his final 13 games. Add in nine goals and 21 points across 20 playoff games, and Cowan quietly was a point-per-game player across his final 50 games of 2022-23. The Leafs believe the strong finish represented Cowan growing into the real version of himself. In Cowan’s mind, that means Nazem Kadri, another former London Knight turned Leafs first-rounder. That’s who Cowan fashions his game after.

Still, everything positive in his scouting reports leading up to the Draft was already out there: strong hockey IQ, commitment to 200-foot play, good hands and so on. And the Draft experts still believed that package added up to somewhere between and second- and fourth-rounder. With his all-round play and pass-first mentality, his ceiling feels more like that of a key support cog than a dominant NHLer.

So why did the Leafs need to pick him 28th overall? For one, they didn’t pick again until the fifth round. And trading up into a middle round might not have worked, either. According to Wes Clark, their director of amateur scouting, 28th was the only place they were going to get Cowan.

“Some people may think we may have reached, but part of the job is collecting intel, and we knew a number of teams behind us had him high on their board,” Clark said Thursday in Nashville. “So he was our guy, and we took him.”

Now, the Leafs wait to see if their guy becomes what they think he’ll become. A hostile takeover as a star OHLer wire to wire next season would be a good place to start. A few years from now, we may look back on this pick as a home run – or a strikeout.

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