New Delhi, June 7 -- The bike test is the one everyone fears. Thirty seconds of full-resistance sprinting with no clock, no finish line visible, trainers screaming to keep going until they decide you're done. When it was over, Caleb Malhotra said it had been sucking the soul out of him. Gavin McKenna, who had just turned in the seventh-best Vo2 Max score in the entire combine field, said the long shifts in junior hockey had prepared him for exactly that kind of suffering.

5-foot-11, 170 pounds, slight by the standards of NHL forwards expected to carry franchise weight. What McKenna delivered across two days of fitness testing at the 2026 NHL Scouting Combine in Buffalo was a systematic refutation of that concern. He ranked among the top ...