Canucks’ package for Bo Horvat: Aatu Räty’s potential, Anthony Beauvillier’s value, more.

By Harman Dayal

Bo Horvat didn’t mince words: He thought he was going to be “a Canuck for life” this summer.


Horvat mentioned that three separate times over the course of his Zoom press conference on Monday with Islanders and Canucks media. The breakup hurts for Canucks fans but it marks a new chapter in this franchise’s history. That future will be defined in large part by the package the Canucks acquired: Aatu Räty, a 2023 conditional first-round pick and 25-year-old Anthony Beauvillier.

Let’s dive deeper into this package and analyze whether the Canucks garnered enough value.

Did Vancouver get enough back?
Horvat could end up re-signing in New York long-term but colleague Pierre LeBrun reiterated that the Canucks did not grant formal permission to Horvat’s agent to discuss a possible extension with other teams. Vancouver probably felt that granting permission may have given Horvat’s camp too much leverage in dictating the destination and limited the club’s number of potential trade partners.

It’s highly unlikely that Lou Lamiorello would have done the trade without having some faith that he could extend Horvat, but Vancouver’s former captain was ultimately dealt as a rental.

Rental forwards haven’t gone for massive hauls in recent history. Claude Giroux returned a 2024 first-round pick, Owen Tippett and a third-round pick last year (with a fifth-round pick going back to Florida). Kevin Hayes, who had 42 points in 51 games at the time of the 2019 trade deadline and was acquired as a second-line centre, netted a first-round pick and fourth-line grinder Brendan Lemieux.

Jean-Gabriel Pageau, a significantly inferior player than Horvat, impressively netted the Senators a first- and second-round pick in 2020. But that trade came with a six-year extension signed the same day and it’s frankly an outlier. Consider that Mark Stone, with an extension signed immediately after the trade, went to Vegas for Erik Brannstrom and a second-round pick at the 2020 deadline as well. Horvat plays the more valuable position, but Stone was the better player because of his elite defensive impact.

Matt Duchene, a credible centre who was tearing it up with 27 goals and 58 points in 50 games at the 2019 trade deadline, also sticks out as a fascinating comparable for Horvat. Columbus surrendered a first-round pick, B-grade prospect Vitaly Abramov, another first-round pick conditional on an extension and Jonathan Davidsson, who had limited value. That was a lower floor but higher ceiling package for the Senators compared to the Horvat return. They’d get two first-round picks and a solid prospect if Duchene re-signed in Columbus — a huge win — but a lone first-round pick and a lesser prospect in Abramov if he didn’t. Duchene didn’t ultimately extend with the Blue Jackets.

When a blockbuster trade is made, there’s a rush for fans to figure out whether they fleeced the other team or whether they were the ones that got robbed. This case isn’t nearly that black and white. Vancouver’s return definitely isn’t a grand slam but it’s completely fair considering the recent returns for top rental forwards.

Honestly, thank goodness the club targeted futures rather than making a mid-20s player like Brandon Carlo the centrepiece.

The first-round pick is the highest-ceiling asset
When you sell a rental at the deadline and acquire a first-round pick, you suspect that it’s going to land in the mid-20s or later. The first-round pick the Canucks acquired from the Islanders is a lot more valuable than one they might have gotten from a powerhouse like the Bruins. It’s top-12 protected for this year, but will roll over unprotected for 2024 in that case.

If the season ended today, the Islanders would possess the No. 13 pick which would transfer to the Canucks. That would be a tantalizing possibility.

Of course, adding a piece like Horvat changes the complexion of the Islanders’ roster and makes them more formidable in the playoff race. The Eastern Conference is a behemoth though, with Dom Luszczyszyn’s model pegging the Islanders with a 19 percent shot at the playoffs (it was 14 percent before the Horvat trade). New York needs to steal a wild-card spot from a team like Pittsburgh or Washington, while simultaneously warding off last year’s Presidents’ Trophy-winning Florida Panthers and the quickly rising Buffalo Sabres, who are also on the outside looking in. It’s going to be a big challenge for New York.

According to Luszczyszyn’s model, there’s a 55 percent chance of the Islanders’ first-round pick landing somewhere between 13th to 16th and belonging to the Canucks. The dream scenario is that New York finishes in the bottom 12, keeps the pick this year, bottoms out next season because of an aging roster lacking cap flexibility and the Canucks wind up with a golden unprotected 2024 selection. That relies on a lot of assumptions, but it’s an exciting possibility.

Räty will blossom into an effective NHLer, but can he stick at centre?
Räty was by far the best prospect the Islanders had in their pipeline, which was shallow overall. The floor is very high for the 20-year-old Finn and across the board, NHL scouts that The Athletic spoke to were fond of his game. Räty has a lot of projectable tools with his size, high work rate, decent hands and a heavy shot. He’s viewed as a near-lock to become a third-line player who could top out as a second-liner if he hits his ceiling.


Interestingly, many people had varying degrees of concern that Räty might be a more effective winger than he is a centre. The question for that surrounds his skating — he can charge down the ice once he’s picked up steam but lacks explosive acceleration — and a lack of high-end hockey sense which could impede his ability to drive a line from the middle. Räty’s made progress with his skating but some still wonder what position he’ll be most effective at.

One NHL director of amateur scouting, who was granted anonymity because he isn’t permitted to speak about players on other teams, said that he “likes him better at wing” even though he’s a fan of Räty overall.

During Patrik Allvin’s press conference on Monday, InGoal Magazine’s Kevin Woodley said that others see Räty as more of a winger and asked the Canucks GM whether he views the player as a centre.

“I definitely would hope that we continue to work with him in the middle,” said Allvin. “The games I’ve seen with him up in New York, he’s been playing centre there — very, very responsible 200-foot game.”

It’s definitely encouraging that the Islanders were developing Räty as a centre. But as we’ve seen with J.T. Miller, there’s a big difference between a forward who can play centre versus someone who’s best at centre in the NHL. The Canucks need to give Räty a long opportunity to develop down the middle given the club’s positional need. We’ll see if he can ultimately excel there or whether they’ll have to eventually shift him to the wing.

Beauvillier’s addition highlights Canucks’ glut of expensive middle-class wingers
Increasingly, teams are moving away from investing large chunks of capital in non-elite wingers. It’s not that contracts for middle-class wingers are necessarily bad and should always be avoided, because in some cases it makes sense, it’s just generally viewed as less efficient than allocating those dollars to premium positions like centre and defence.

I tried to identify how much teams are investing in middle-class wingers. To do this, I searched for any winger carrying a $2.5 million cap hit or higher who’s scoring at less than 0.8 points per game this season (a 65-point pace per 82 games). It’s by no means a perfect definition, just a rough criteria to have some parameters.

After the Horvat trade, the Canucks have $23.75 million committed for next season to five wingers who fit these criteria (Beauvillier at $4.15 million, Conor Garland, Brock Boeser, Ilya Mikheyev and Tanner Pearson). Vancouver’s allocation to middle-class wingers for next season is projected to be the second-highest in the NHL. I didn’t include Miller just to give the Canucks benefit of the doubt even though he’s more effective at wing than centre. If you included his $8 million salary, the Canucks would be first by a long shot.

NHL middle class wingers 2023-24
1
Seattle Kraken
$24.9M
Eberle, McCann, Bjorkstrand, Schwartz, Tanev
2
Vancouver Canucks
$23.75M
Garland, Beauvillier, Boeser, Mikheyev, Pearson
3
Calgary Flames
$21.2M
Huberdeau, Coleman, Mangiapane,
4
Montreal Canadiens
$19.9M
Gallagher, Armia, Hoffman, Anderson
5
Los Angeles Kings
$17.95M
Kempe, Arvidsson, Iafallo, Moore
6
New York Islanders
$17M
Palmieri, Lee, Bailey
7
Washington Capitals
$16.61M
Wilson, Oshie, Mantha
8
Pittsburgh Penguins
$16.075M
Rust, Rakell, Kapanen, McGinn
9
Anaheim Ducks
$14.7M
Henrique, Silfverberg, Vatrano
10
Dallas Stars
$14.35M
Seguin, Marchment
11
Minnesota Wild
$13.1M
Boldy, Foligno, Greenway
12
Detroit Red Wings
$12.875M
Fabbri, Vrana, Perron
13
Edmonton Oilers
$10.975M
Kane, Foegele, Yamamoto
14
New York Rangers
$10.1M
Kreider, Goodrow
15
Philadelphia Flyers
$10.875M
Farabee, Atkinson
16
Boston Bruins
$10.75M
Hall, Zacha
17
Vegas Golden Knights
$10M
Smith, Marchessault
18
San Jose Sharks
$9.725M
Labanc, Lindblom, Barabanov
19
Florida Panthers
$9.5M
Reinhart, Duclair
20
Columbus Blue Jackets
$8.25M
Voracek
21
Arizona Coyotes
$7.5M
Crouse, Kassian
22
Buffalo Sabres
$7.25M
Olofsson, Mittelstadt
23
Nashville Predators
$6.857M
Niederreiter, Sissons
24
New Jersey Devils
$6M
Palat
25
Carolina Hurricanes
$5.4M
Teravainen
26
Chicago Blackhawks
$5M
Johnson
27
Colorado Avalanche
$4.5M
Lehkonen
28
St. Louis Blues
$4.5M
Saad
29
Ottawa Senators
$2.95M
Joseph
30
Winnipeg Jets
$0
31
Toronto Maple Leafs
$0
32
Tampa Bay Lightning
$0
Seattle can uniquely allocate resources this way only because the highest-paid forward on the team, Jordan Eberle, makes only $5.5 million. Teams like the Canucks who have highly paid stars can’t afford to sustain a model like this — something will need to give.

Can the Canucks turn Beauvillier into an asset down the line?
Beauvillier’s a decent player and should produce more in Vancouver. He brings excellent speed and can hunt pucks down with the high-motor style he plays. The good news is that Beauvillier’s $4.15 million cap hit only runs through next season before he becomes a UFA, so Vancouver’s not tied up long-term.

The Islanders would have presumably wanted to dump Beauvillier in this deal — they’ve had him on the trade block since last summer. Beauvillier’s useful and could even live up to his contract if he hits, but the Canucks probably would have been better off with the $4.15 million in cap space to perhaps upgrade the back end. It’s no big deal if you’re part of a team rebuild and don’t believe a quick turnaround for next season matters.

Management’s talked about a retool and shorter fixes, however, in which case Beauvillier’s cap hit is a hindrance (unless they’re able to trade Boeser and/or Garland without taking significant salary back, which seems difficult).

Vancouver’s currently projected to have around $6.35 million in cap space for next season according to CapFriendly. That number will rise once trades and/or buyouts happen, plus if Pearson winds up on LTIR for all of 2023-24. But barring creative moves, it won’t be monumentally higher. That’s a problem because the Canucks need about three top-four defencemen and have to replace Horvat.

Of course, if the team’s competitiveness next season doesn’t matter — and it shouldn’t — then there’s nothing to sweat about. Perhaps Beauvillier can resurrect his value and be dealt at next year’s trade deadline for a second- or third-round pick in which the Horvat deal would indirectly yield another asset.

Canucks’ package for Bo Horvat: Aatu Räty’s potential, Anthony Beauvillier’s value, more.

By Harman Dayal

Bo Horvat didn’t mince words: He thought he was going to be “a Canuck for life” this summer.


Horvat mentioned that three separate times over the course of his Zoom press conference on Monday with Islanders and Canucks media. The breakup hurts for Canucks fans but it marks a new chapter in this franchise’s history. That future will be defined in large part by the package the Canucks acquired: Aatu Räty, a 2023 conditional first-round pick and 25-year-old Anthony Beauvillier.

Let’s dive deeper into this package and analyze whether the Canucks garnered enough value.

Did Vancouver get enough back?
Horvat could end up re-signing in New York long-term but colleague Pierre LeBrun reiterated that the Canucks did not grant formal permission to Horvat’s agent to discuss a possible extension with other teams. Vancouver probably felt that granting permission may have given Horvat’s camp too much leverage in dictating the destination and limited the club’s number of potential trade partners.

It’s highly unlikely that Lou Lamiorello would have done the trade without having some faith that he could extend Horvat, but Vancouver’s former captain was ultimately dealt as a rental.

Rental forwards haven’t gone for massive hauls in recent history. Claude Giroux returned a 2024 first-round pick, Owen Tippett and a third-round pick last year (with a fifth-round pick going back to Florida). Kevin Hayes, who had 42 points in 51 games at the time of the 2019 trade deadline and was acquired as a second-line centre, netted a first-round pick and fourth-line grinder Brendan Lemieux.

Jean-Gabriel Pageau, a significantly inferior player than Horvat, impressively netted the Senators a first- and second-round pick in 2020. But that trade came with a six-year extension signed the same day and it’s frankly an outlier. Consider that Mark Stone, with an extension signed immediately after the trade, went to Vegas for Erik Brannstrom and a second-round pick at the 2020 deadline as well. Horvat plays the more valuable position, but Stone was the better player because of his elite defensive impact.

Matt Duchene, a credible centre who was tearing it up with 27 goals and 58 points in 50 games at the 2019 trade deadline, also sticks out as a fascinating comparable for Horvat. Columbus surrendered a first-round pick, B-grade prospect Vitaly Abramov, another first-round pick conditional on an extension and Jonathan Davidsson, who had limited value. That was a lower floor but higher ceiling package for the Senators compared to the Horvat return. They’d get two first-round picks and a solid prospect if Duchene re-signed in Columbus — a huge win — but a lone first-round pick and a lesser prospect in Abramov if he didn’t. Duchene didn’t ultimately extend with the Blue Jackets.

When a blockbuster trade is made, there’s a rush for fans to figure out whether they fleeced the other team or whether they were the ones that got robbed. This case isn’t nearly that black and white. Vancouver’s return definitely isn’t a grand slam but it’s completely fair considering the recent returns for top rental forwards.

Honestly, thank goodness the club targeted futures rather than making a mid-20s player like Brandon Carlo the centrepiece.

The first-round pick is the highest-ceiling asset
When you sell a rental at the deadline and acquire a first-round pick, you suspect that it’s going to land in the mid-20s or later. The first-round pick the Canucks acquired from the Islanders is a lot more valuable than one they might have gotten from a powerhouse like the Bruins. It’s top-12 protected for this year, but will roll over unprotected for 2024 in that case.

If the season ended today, the Islanders would possess the No. 13 pick which would transfer to the Canucks. That would be a tantalizing possibility.

Of course, adding a piece like Horvat changes the complexion of the Islanders’ roster and makes them more formidable in the playoff race. The Eastern Conference is a behemoth though, with Dom Luszczyszyn’s model pegging the Islanders with a 19 percent shot at the playoffs (it was 14 percent before the Horvat trade). New York needs to steal a wild-card spot from a team like Pittsburgh or Washington, while simultaneously warding off last year’s Presidents’ Trophy-winning Florida Panthers and the quickly rising Buffalo Sabres, who are also on the outside looking in. It’s going to be a big challenge for New York.

According to Luszczyszyn’s model, there’s a 55 percent chance of the Islanders’ first-round pick landing somewhere between 13th to 16th and belonging to the Canucks. The dream scenario is that New York finishes in the bottom 12, keeps the pick this year, bottoms out next season because of an aging roster lacking cap flexibility and the Canucks wind up with a golden unprotected 2024 selection. That relies on a lot of assumptions, but it’s an exciting possibility.

Räty will blossom into an effective NHLer, but can he stick at centre?
Räty was by far the best prospect the Islanders had in their pipeline, which was shallow overall. The floor is very high for the 20-year-old Finn and across the board, NHL scouts that The Athletic spoke to were fond of his game. Räty has a lot of projectable tools with his size, high work rate, decent hands and a heavy shot. He’s viewed as a near-lock to become a third-line player who could top out as a second-liner if he hits his ceiling.


Interestingly, many people had varying degrees of concern that Räty might be a more effective winger than he is a centre. The question for that surrounds his skating — he can charge down the ice once he’s picked up steam but lacks explosive acceleration — and a lack of high-end hockey sense which could impede his ability to drive a line from the middle. Räty’s made progress with his skating but some still wonder what position he’ll be most effective at.

One NHL director of amateur scouting, who was granted anonymity because he isn’t permitted to speak about players on other teams, said that he “likes him better at wing” even though he’s a fan of Räty overall.

During Patrik Allvin’s press conference on Monday, InGoal Magazine’s Kevin Woodley said that others see Räty as more of a winger and asked the Canucks GM whether he views the player as a centre.

“I definitely would hope that we continue to work with him in the middle,” said Allvin. “The games I’ve seen with him up in New York, he’s been playing centre there — very, very responsible 200-foot game.”

It’s definitely encouraging that the Islanders were developing Räty as a centre. But as we’ve seen with J.T. Miller, there’s a big difference between a forward who can play centre versus someone who’s best at centre in the NHL. The Canucks need to give Räty a long opportunity to develop down the middle given the club’s positional need. We’ll see if he can ultimately excel there or whether they’ll have to eventually shift him to the wing.

Beauvillier’s addition highlights Canucks’ glut of expensive middle-class wingers
Increasingly, teams are moving away from investing large chunks of capital in non-elite wingers. It’s not that contracts for middle-class wingers are necessarily bad and should always be avoided, because in some cases it makes sense, it’s just generally viewed as less efficient than allocating those dollars to premium positions like centre and defence.

I tried to identify how much teams are investing in middle-class wingers. To do this, I searched for any winger carrying a $2.5 million cap hit or higher who’s scoring at less than 0.8 points per game this season (a 65-point pace per 82 games). It’s by no means a perfect definition, just a rough criteria to have some parameters.

After the Horvat trade, the Canucks have $23.75 million committed for next season to five wingers who fit these criteria (Beauvillier at $4.15 million, Conor Garland, Brock Boeser, Ilya Mikheyev and Tanner Pearson). Vancouver’s allocation to middle-class wingers for next season is projected to be the second-highest in the NHL. I didn’t include Miller just to give the Canucks benefit of the doubt even though he’s more effective at wing than centre. If you included his $8 million salary, the Canucks would be first by a long shot.

NHL middle class wingers 2023-24
1
Seattle Kraken
$24.9M
Eberle, McCann, Bjorkstrand, Schwartz, Tanev
2
Vancouver Canucks
$23.75M
Garland, Beauvillier, Boeser, Mikheyev, Pearson
3
Calgary Flames
$21.2M
Huberdeau, Coleman, Mangiapane,
4
Montreal Canadiens
$19.9M
Gallagher, Armia, Hoffman, Anderson
5
Los Angeles Kings
$17.95M
Kempe, Arvidsson, Iafallo, Moore
6
New York Islanders
$17M
Palmieri, Lee, Bailey
7
Washington Capitals
$16.61M
Wilson, Oshie, Mantha
8
Pittsburgh Penguins
$16.075M
Rust, Rakell, Kapanen, McGinn
9
Anaheim Ducks
$14.7M
Henrique, Silfverberg, Vatrano
10
Dallas Stars
$14.35M
Seguin, Marchment
11
Minnesota Wild
$13.1M
Boldy, Foligno, Greenway
12
Detroit Red Wings
$12.875M
Fabbri, Vrana, Perron
13
Edmonton Oilers
$10.975M
Kane, Foegele, Yamamoto
14
New York Rangers
$10.1M
Kreider, Goodrow
15
Philadelphia Flyers
$10.875M
Farabee, Atkinson
16
Boston Bruins
$10.75M
Hall, Zacha
17
Vegas Golden Knights
$10M
Smith, Marchessault
18
San Jose Sharks
$9.725M
Labanc, Lindblom, Barabanov
19
Florida Panthers
$9.5M
Reinhart, Duclair
20
Columbus Blue Jackets
$8.25M
Voracek
21
Arizona Coyotes
$7.5M
Crouse, Kassian
22
Buffalo Sabres
$7.25M
Olofsson, Mittelstadt
23
Nashville Predators
$6.857M
Niederreiter, Sissons
24
New Jersey Devils
$6M
Palat
25
Carolina Hurricanes
$5.4M
Teravainen
26
Chicago Blackhawks
$5M
Johnson
27
Colorado Avalanche
$4.5M
Lehkonen
28
St. Louis Blues
$4.5M
Saad
29
Ottawa Senators
$2.95M
Joseph
30
Winnipeg Jets
$0
31
Toronto Maple Leafs
$0
32
Tampa Bay Lightning
$0
Seattle can uniquely allocate resources this way only because the highest-paid forward on the team, Jordan Eberle, makes only $5.5 million. Teams like the Canucks who have highly paid stars can’t afford to sustain a model like this — something will need to give.

Can the Canucks turn Beauvillier into an asset down the line?
Beauvillier’s a decent player and should produce more in Vancouver. He brings excellent speed and can hunt pucks down with the high-motor style he plays. The good news is that Beauvillier’s $4.15 million cap hit only runs through next season before he becomes a UFA, so Vancouver’s not tied up long-term.

The Islanders would have presumably wanted to dump Beauvillier in this deal — they’ve had him on the trade block since last summer. Beauvillier’s useful and could even live up to his contract if he hits, but the Canucks probably would have been better off with the $4.15 million in cap space to perhaps upgrade the back end. It’s no big deal if you’re part of a team rebuild and don’t believe a quick turnaround for next season matters.

Management’s talked about a retool and shorter fixes, however, in which case Beauvillier’s cap hit is a hindrance (unless they’re able to trade Boeser and/or Garland without taking significant salary back, which seems difficult).

Vancouver’s currently projected to have around $6.35 million in cap space for next season according to CapFriendly. That number will rise once trades and/or buyouts happen, plus if Pearson winds up on LTIR for all of 2023-24. But barring creative moves, it won’t be monumentally higher. That’s a problem because the Canucks need about three top-four defencemen and have to replace Horvat.

Of course, if the team’s competitiveness next season doesn’t matter — and it shouldn’t — then there’s nothing to sweat about. Perhaps Beauvillier can resurrect his value and be dealt at next year’s trade deadline for a second- or third-round pick in which the Horvat deal would indirectly yield another asset.
- LeftCoaster

So Canucks are following the Kraken model. Good to see the 50 year old franchise trying to emulate the 2 year old one

Thanks lefty!

So Canucks are following the Kraken model. Good to see the 50 year old franchise trying to emulate the 2 year old one

Thanks lefty!
- Nucker101

I'm not sure why you are thanking Lefty?

To do this, I searched for any winger carrying a $2.5 million cap hit or higher who’s scoring at less than 0.8 points per game this season

TB has zero. What about Alex Killorn. 4.5M cap hit scoring at .71 ppg. What about Nameistikov? 2.5M @ .24 ppg.

Lefties Flyers Farabee and Atkinson. What about JVR? 7M for .68 pgg.

Mtl Gallagher, Armia, Hoffman, Anderson... Where's 5M Dadanov? .32 ppg.

Was there some sort of other parameters that were involved that he isn't saying? Those are wingers who make 2.5M or more cap hit and who are scoring at less than .8 ppg.

So Canucks are following the Kraken model. Good to see the 50 year old franchise trying to emulate the 2 year old one

Thanks lefty!
- Nucker101

There's a lot to unravel with the Canucks cap situation in order to fix the defense. Seattle got to start from scratch, something not afforded to any other franchises. They put a good group together and made an excellent selection with Matty Beniers at #2 overall.

I don't know what the plan is but I like that they are selling. Cannot for the life of me understand the Boeser extension, just an asinine move on par with trading for OEL and Garland. The back half of last season really fooled these guys, really fooled them!!

I'm not sure why you are thanking Lefty?



TB has zero. What about Alex Killorn. 4.5M cap hit scoring at .71 ppg. What about Nameistikov? 2.5M @ .24 ppg.

Lefties Flyers Farabee and Atkinson. What about JVR? 7M for .68 pgg.

Mtl Gallagher, Armia, Hoffman, Anderson... Where's 5M Dadanov? .32 ppg.

Was there some sort of other parameters that were involved that he isn't saying? Those are wingers who make 2.5M or more cap hit and who are scoring at less than .8 ppg.
- manvanfan

You need to cut back on the haterade. He's thanking me because he doesn't have a subscription and I shared the article with him and everyone else. So much anger inside of you.

There's a lot to unravel with the Canucks cap situation in order to fix the defense. Seattle got to start from scratch, something not afforded to any other franchises. They put a good group together and made an excellent selection with Matty Beniers at #2 overall.

I don't know what the plan is but I like that they are selling. Cannot for the life of me understand the Boeser extension, just an asinine move on par with trading for OEL and Garland. The back half of last season really fooled these guys, really fooled them!!
- LeftCoaster

Um, Vegas, like a couple years before?

Um, Vegas, like a couple years before?
- NewYorkNuck

The Canucks (and Sabres) in 1970?

You need to cut back on the haterade. He's thanking me because he doesn't have a subscription and I shared the article with him and everyone else. So much anger inside of you.
- LeftCoaster

There is only a certain level of stupid I can take in a day. You can surpass that level in mere posts

You need to cut back on the haterade. He's thanking me because he doesn't have a subscription and I shared the article with him and everyone else. So much anger inside of you.
- LeftCoaster

I've enjoyed most of them.
Thanks, Lefty and don't feed the angry little cuckold in Manitoba. He lives in Manitoba.

I've enjoyed most of them.
Thanks, Lefty and don't feed the angry little cuckold in Manitoba. He lives in Manitoba.
- Marwood

You wouldn't know a decent article about hockey is why you enjoy them

2023 NHL Draft prospects: Connor Bedard leads Corey Pronman’s midseason ranking.

Corey Pronman Jan 31, 2023

With the World Junior Championship in the rearview mirror, it is now 2023 NHL Draft season. In case you haven’t heard, Regina center Connor Bedard had a historic tournament, adding to his already tremendous resume. Bedard is the clear top prospect in this draft class and a potential franchise-changing player.

In November, I wrote that Michigan center Adam Fantilli was closing the gap with Bedard. While accurate based on what I was hearing from league sources at the time, I understand how that looks somewhat funny in hindsight. The gap between No. 1 and No. 2 is quite significant in this draft at the moment. The gap between No. 4 and No. 5 in this draft, though, is arguably just as wide. The 2023 NHL Draft possesses four outstanding prospects at the top in Bedard, Fantilli, Leo Carlsson and Matvei Michkov, names that would have challenged or been the favorite for the No. 1 overall pick in a number of other recent drafts.

The 2023 NHL Draft currently is a forward-heavy draft and a west-heavy draft. Only two defensemen are listed in my top 15. Five players playing in Western Canada are in the top 15. The 2023 NHL Draft looks like an above-average draft, mostly driven by the premium talent in the top four. After them the body of the draft looks mostly standard to other drafts in terms of depth and quality. We are still only in January; a lot will change over the coming months as the draft process ramps up.

Ranked players are placed into tiers and given tool grades. Tool grades are based on a scale with six separate levels, with an eye toward how this attribute would grade in the NHL (poor, below average, average, above average, high-end and elite). “Average” on this scale means the tool projects as NHL average, which is meant as a positive, not a criticism. Skating, puck skills, hockey sense and compete for every projected NHL player are graded. Shot grades are only included if a shot is notably good or poor.

Projected elite NHL player (Tier 1)
1. Connor Bedard, C, Regina (WHL)

Jul. 17, 2005 | 5′ 9.75″ | 185 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 1

Tier: Projected elite NHL player

Skating: Above NHL average
Puck skills: Elite
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: Elite

Analysis: Coming off one of the best individual world juniors ever by a player, there is no doubt who leads this draft class. Bedard is a potential franchise-changing No. 1 prospect. His skill and shot are legit game-breaking attributes. His ability to beat defenders one-on-one is among the best I’ve ever seen by a 17-year-old, and the pace at which he displays that elite skill is going to allow him to execute those types of skilled plays in the NHL. Bedard is a highly imaginative puckhandler and a very creative passer. That, combined with the fact his wrist shot is a top-tier NHL weapon from anywhere in the offensive zone, makes him a projected nightmare for NHL coaches to stop on the power play. The only downside to his game is his frame, which has some scouts wondering if he gets pushed off to the wing in the NHL. Given his success as a junior center, his strong skating and his high compete level, I think whoever drafts him will have to try him down the middle and move him to the wing if it doesn’t work. If he is a wing, he could still have a potential Patrick Kane/Nikita Kucherov type of impact on a franchise.


Projected bubble elite NHL player and NHL All-Star (Tier 2)
2. Adam Fantilli, C, Michigan (BIG10)

Oct. 12, 2004 | 6′ 2.0″ | 195 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 2

Tier: Projected bubble elite NHL player and NHL All-Star

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: High-end
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: High-end
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Fantilli’s world juniors was just OK, but he’s still having one of the best seasons ever in modern history by a first-year draft eligible in college. There’s so much to love about his NHL projection. He’s got a huge frame, skates well and competes hard. He wins a lot of battles and isn’t shy to use his big frame to lay out opponents. He has game-breaking puck skills and will be able to beat NHL opponents regularly with his puckhandling, especially given his speed and wing span. His playmaking isn’t the main thing that gets you excited about his game, but Fantilli can make difficult passes and has strong enough sense. His shot is also a threat from range. He checks every box and projects as a No. 1 center on a good NHL team.

3. Matvei Michkov, RW, Sochi (RUSSIA)

Dec. 9, 2004 | 5′ 10.0″ | 172 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 3

Tier: Projected bubble elite NHL player and NHL All-Star

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: High-end
Hockey sense: Elite
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Michkov hasn’t played a ton of hockey this season, but when he has, he’s looked his usual excellent self. He’s since being loaned from SKA to Sochi, where he’s getting regular KHL time and looks like he belongs at that level. He’s one of the most creative and intelligent offensive players I’ve seen in the last few years. He combines his incredible puck skills with a true elite goal-scoring instinct. He anticipates the play and attacks defenders differently than other forwards and always seems to find ways to figure into scoring chances despite not being the biggest or fastest. He can make plays at a high level, but Michkov is a finisher who will score a lot of goals as a pro. His skating is more elusive than fast and I wouldn’t call him a high-energy type, although he gets to the net to create. He’s signed in the KHL through the 2025-26 season.

4. Leo Carlsson, C, Orebro (SWEDEN)

Dec. 26, 2004 | 6′ 3.0″ | 198 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 4

Tier: Projected bubble elite NHL player and NHL All-Star

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: High-end
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Carlsson has looked excellent this season between the SHL and Sweden’s U20 team. He has elite skill, which when combined with his frame and a strong motor has allowed to him to be a very good player in a great league as a draft eligible. Carlsson routinely shows the ability to beat defenders with skill. He gets a ton of chances in the high-percentage areas, both due to his skill and his willingness to attack the net. He’s an excellent playmaker as well with a very imaginative offensive mind who can run a pro power play. His only drawback is a lack of true separation speed. I’ve seen worse feet on a 6-foot-3 guy, but he won’t be turning NHL defensemen around. He’s listed as a center, and has dabbled at it at the J20 level, but for the most part over the last two years I’ve seen him play wing.

Projected top-of-the-lineup player (Tier 3)
5. William Smith, C, Usa U-18 (NTDP)

Mar. 17, 2005 | 5′ 11.75″ | 178 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 5

Tier: Projected top of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: At the start of the season I would’ve said Smith would be the clear No. 1 prospect on this USNTDP club. I wouldn’t say that now, but Smith is still the guy and looks like a premium prospect. He is a dynamic offensive player who stands out every game with his talent. He has tremendous puck skills, vision and overall offensive creativity. He skates well and makes so many high-difficulty plays at a strong pace which lends well to his pro projection. Smith is a high-end passer who is also able to finish chances from the dots. The only real wart in his game is I wouldn’t call him an overly physical or competitive player, although I don’t think he lacks effort.

6. David Reinbacher, D, Kloten (SWISS)

Oct. 25, 2004 | 6′ 2.0″ | 185 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 9

Tier: Projected top of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Reinbacher has quickly drawn the interest of the NHL world with his very strong play in Switzerland’s top league, where he’s playing real minutes and scoring in a tough league as a draft eligible. He’s a mobile, 6-foot-2 right-shot defenseman who can contribute at both ends. Reinbacher’s gap control is strong, killing a lot of plays due to his feet. He can close on guys with his body too, and shows a high compete level to win back pucks. He’s able to both skate and pass pucks up ice. His offensive touch isn’t elite, but he has creativity with the puck and makes good decisions. There’s a lot of NHL in his game and he will be highly coveted in the draft.

7. Eduard Sale, LW, Brno (CZECHIA)

Mar. 10, 2005 | 6′ 2.0″ | 174 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 7

Tier: Projected top of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Sale has been up and down this season versus men in Czechia, but he was good with their U20 team and generally has looked very impressive over a long time span. Sale’s raw toolkit is very exciting. He’s 6 feet 2, skates quite well and has a ton of natural offensive abilities. He has the hands to beat NHL defensemen regularly and with his length and speed he’ll be able to drive play at even strength. Sale is a great passer who can run a power play well and hit seams at a strong clip. He can shoot the puck well enough but is better as a passer for me. His compete is OK. I wouldn’t call him a physical or high-energy type of player, but he shows enough courage to get to the net and doesn’t put in bad efforts regularly.

8. Danil But, LW, Yaroslavl (RUSSIA)

Feb. 15, 2005 | 6′ 5.0″ | 203 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 10

Tier: Projected top of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: But has been one of the better forwards in Russia’s junior league over the last two seasons. He’s a large, highly skilled forward who can score. But makes a lot of crafty plays with the puck in small areas, and with his massive wingspan he’s able to pull pucks past a lot of checkers. He can both make and finish plays well, but he’s more of a goal scorer. But isn’t blazing fast, but for a 6-foot-5 guy he can motor up the ice quite well, and he’ll be able to power his way to the net off rushes at higher levels. He gives a solid effort and is often involved in the play. Even though I don’t see a high-end trait other than his size, But checks every box and will help an NHL team win.

Projected bubble top and middle-of-the-lineup player (Tier 4)
9. Nate Danielson, C, Brandon (WHL)

Sep. 27, 2004 | 6′ 1.5″ | 185 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 11

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: After a slow start to the season, Danielson has looked a lot more like himself in recent months. He’s a well-rounded center who has a lot of NHL traits. He has the high-end skill and hockey sense to make a lot of plays inside the offensive zone, and also has the NHL body and skating ability to make you think he will be able to make those kinds of plays at higher levels. Danielson can drive the play and be relied on in any situation due to his brain, feet and compete down the middle. He’s a potential top-two line NHL center.

10. Oliver Moore, C, Usa U-18 (NTDP)

Jan. 22, 2005 | 5′ 11.0″ | 188 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 14

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: High-end
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Moore’s draft stock has continued to climb as the season has gone along. Part of that is due to how good he’s looked while not playing on the loaded top USNTDP line. Moore’s skating is electric and his edge work is NHL-elite caliber. He evades pressure so well and is able to go from a stop to a fast gear very quickly. He has very good hands to go with those feet and projects to get a ton of controlled zone entries in the NHL. I don’t think his playmaking is a major asset, but he can make some plays and looks comfortable on the power play both as a shooter and passer. Moore lacks size, but he’s a worker. He gets to the net, comes back hard on defense and coaches trust him in tough situations. He has a ton of NHL projectability.


11. Samuel Honzek, LW, Vancouver (WHL)

Nov. 12, 2004 | 6′ 3.5″ | 186 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 25

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Prior to a nasty injury suffered at the world juniors, Honzek’s game was trending in a very positive direction. In an already loaded WHL class, he was one of the top scorers in his first year in the league. His game is exciting from a pro projection standpoint. He’s a big forward who can skate well, which when combined with the offense he’s showing makes for a well-rounded player. I don’t think he’s amazing with the puck, but he has good hands and can make some tough plays. With his size, details and work ethic he can play any spot on a power play and is a solid defensive player too. He has all the tools of a future top-six forward.

12. Zach Benson, LW, Winnipeg (WHL)

May. 12, 2005 | 5′ 9.0″ | 160 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 12

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: High-end

Analysis: Benson has been on fire over the last few months and a leading player for a top CHL club. He’s got a ton of skill and creativity, he’s one of the better passers in junior and projects to be a major asset on an NHL power play. Benson lacks ideal size at 5-foot-9, but he plays quite hard. He’s relentless in puck battles and wins his fair share of them. His frame, combined with a lack of separation speed, is a concern though for his NHL projection even though he’s got good quickness in tight. His great compete makes you comfortable he will find a way to overcome those issues though, especially when you consider how much offense he brings to the table.

13. Dalibor Dvorsky, C, Aik (SWEDEN-2)

Jun. 15, 2005 | 6′ 1.0″ | 201 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 6

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Dvorsky has been up and down this season but his world juniors was some of his better hockey. Inside the offensive zone he can do a lot. He has excellent puck skills and can make checkers miss routinely. He can make tough plays and find seams. He excels as a goal scorer though with a wrist shot and one timer that he can often finish from range. Dvorsky’s compete is good enough, he wins puck battles and he isn’t shy from using his body, but I’d like to see less perimeter play from him and more consistency overall. His footspeed is also going to be an issue for higher levels.

14. Brayden Yager, C, Moose Jaw (WHL)

Jan. 3, 2005 | 5′ 10.5″ | 166 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 8

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: High-end

Analysis: Yager hasn’t scored a ton in the WHL yet this season, but he was arguably the best player at the Hlinka Gretzky this summer and has a rich overall track record. Yager is a player with a pro-style game. He plays with a lot of speed and energy, showing the ability to carry pucks up the ice and make skilled plays with pace. He’s not the biggest center, but Yager plays hard, showing a commitment to making plays without the puck and winning a lot of battles. His main offensive weapon is his shot, which is high end, but he does have the slick hands and vision to beat defenses in other ways. At his size there will be minor questions about whether he’s an actual NHL center but the way he plays makes me think he has a reasonable chance to stick down the middle.

15. Dmitriy Simashev, D, Yaroslavl (RUSSIA)

Feb. 4, 2005 | 6′ 4.0″ | 198 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 13

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Simashev made a strong KHL team out of camp as a 17-year-old defenseman before being sent to junior where he’s looked good. He’s a toolsy defenseman as a 6-foot-4 blueliner who skates well for his size. He’s not dynamic offensively, but he has good puck skills, can make a solid outlet pass and makes some plays from the offensive blue line. Some may criticize Simashev’s production in junior, which is reasonable, but Loko is an elite junior team so I’m not overly concerned given who he has to fight with for ice time. He’s smooth and solid defensively, being good on his gaps and retrievals and doesn’t mind using his big frame. There’s a lot of NHL and pro upside in his game.

Middle-of-the-lineup player or starting goaltender (Tier 5)
16. Ryan Leonard, RW, Usa U-18 (NTDP)

Jan. 21, 2005 | 5′ 11.5″ | 190 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 16

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Leonard is a versatile winger with a lot of elements to his game that an NHL coach will covet. He’s a strong skater who competes well, with a direct style of play. He combines that with excellent hands and an ability to make highly-skilled plays with the puck at full speed. His playmaking isn’t great but there’s vision and finishing ability in his game to score at higher levels. Leonard works very hard and projects as a player who can help both special teams as a pro even if I don’t think he’ll be a standout at either end.

17. Matthew Wood, RW, Uconn (H-EAST)

Feb. 6, 2005 | 6′ 3.5″ | 193 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 15

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Poor
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Below NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Wood has been impressive for a 17-year-old in Hockey East. He’s a very gifted offensive player. Wood has excellent one-on-one skills and offensive IQ. He has the ability to hold onto pucks for an extra second and knows how to beat defenders. He also has an excellent wrist shot and one-timer, making him strong on the power play. Wood is a big winger as well, so the size/skill combo has a lot of upside. However, he’s got a sluggish skating stride, and tends to play too much on the perimeter which concerns scouts on how he’ll play versus men. We saw twice with Team Canada, when surrounded with top talent, he tended to slide down the lineup but still be a big part of their power play.

18. Colby Barlow, LW, Owen Sound (OHL)

Feb. 14, 2005 | 6′ 0.25″ | 193 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 19

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: High-end

Analysis: Barlow has scored a lot over his two OHL seasons and been one of the top point producers in the league this year. I see a lot of things in his game that will translate to higher levels. Barlow is a strong skater who gives an honest effort every night. He can kill penalties, and he can play at an NHL pace. Offensively he has excellent stick skills and a great shot. He’s a threat to score off the rush and from a standstill with his one-timer. Barlow’s playmaking isn’t his selling point, and if anything may hold him back it’s that, but he makes enough plays, and you don’t score as much as he does without hockey sense. He checks a lot of the boxes for the NHL.

19. Tanner Molendyk, D, Saskatoon (WHL)

Feb. 3, 2005 | 5′ 11.5″ | 182 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Above NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Molendyk has looked excellent in the WHL this season for Saskatoon and played a big role with Canada at the Hlinka as well. Moldenyk is a strong two-way defenseman despite not being the biggest defender. This is because of his excellent skating ability and strong work ethic. Molendyk’s edge work is very good. He closes on checks like a pro, and is able to evade pressure at a high level. His top speed is good, not great, but he can lead a rush. Molendyk has strong offensive instincts and skills, and can make plays from off the blue line and on the move. His size will be an issue as a defenseman in the NHL, but he plays hard and doesn’t shy from physical play.

20. Gabriel Perreault, RW, Usa U-18 (NTDP)

May. 7, 2005 | 5′ 10.75″ | 165 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 23

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Perreault has put up massive offensive number as part of that loaded top U.S. NTDP line with Smith and Leonard. He is a very skilled and intelligent winger who can make a ton of positive things happen inside the offensive zone. Perreault makes highly creative dekes and passes with the puck at a high rate, both off the perimeter and in small areas. His puck game is NHL power-play quality, but the debate with him is whether as a smaller winger without great speed is will he score in the NHL? I think because he competes enough, showing a willingness to get and create around the net, it will translate.

21. Quentin Musty, LW, Sudbury (OHL)

Jul. 6, 2005 | 6′ 1.75″ | 200 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: Not Ranked

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Musty has been very good in the OHL this season. He’s a player with a lot of offensive touch in his game. He’s a highly-skilled puckhandler who can make difficult plays with the puck at a high rate. He tries to make things happen and shows a strong level of creativity. Musty is a good passer who can hit open lanes and has the patience to pull up and make plays. His effort is fine, he can use his big body to win battles, but I wouldn’t call his compete an asset. He’s a one-way winger, which combined with his feet, is a concern for higher levels. The degree of skill and offense he’s showing this year along with a good sized frame, though, makes me think he will score in the NHL and help a club.

22. Calum Ritchie, C, Oshawa (OHL)

Jan. 21, 2005 | 6′ 1.75″ | 187 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 17

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Ritchie looks like he should be a good NHL player. When you see a 6-foot-2 center who can skate and handle the puck like him, he sticks out in a massive way and some of the plays he makes are distinct at the junior level. He looks like a top prospect, but it’s been quite stunning to see the number of OHL games where he has little impact. I’m confounded a bit by Ritchie. I don’t think he’s an amazing playmaker, but I see good hockey sense. He can be a bit perimeter at times, and is quite inconsistent, but I’ve seen solid efforts from him at times too. He should be better than this, the talent and track record make me still back him as a strong NHL prospect, even though it’s becoming tougher to do so.

23. Charlie Stramel, C, Wisconsin (BIG10)

Oct. 15, 2004 | 6′ 3.0″ | 212 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 18

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: Below NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Stramel has had a strange season. He struggled mightily to start his freshman season, and then went to the world juniors where he looked quite good and showed glimpses of the strong play he had at the U.S. NTDP. The tools remain highly intriguing. Stramel is a 6-foot-3 center who can skate well and plays a highly-physical brand of hockey. The degree of offense is the major question on his game. I think he has good hands and can create a little, but he lacks vision and won’t be a big-time scorer as a pro. Even with that in mind, a big, fast, competitive center with secondary offense is a highly valuable piece for an NHL team.

24. Axel Sandin Pellikka, D, Skelleftea (SWEDEN)

Mar. 11, 2005 | 5′ 10.75″ | 176 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Sandin Pellikka has trended up as the season has gone along. He’s put up big numbers in Sweden’s junior league, while also getting ice time for a top SHL team. He played well with Sweden’s U18 team and even better with their world juniors team. Sandin Pellikka is a highly-creative and intelligent puck-mover. He has excellent puck skills, showing the ability to beat opponents often with skill. He can improvise well with the puck, while also showing strong playmaking ability with the poise to make plays from the blue line at the highest levels. He skates well enough, and can make plays on the move creating offense off the rush and from blue line activations. Sandin Pellikka lacks ideal NHL size for a defenseman and I wouldn’t call him overly physical. His defensive play will be the main question especially as he gets closer to the NHL, but he has clear top-four D and NHL power-play offensive abilities.

25. Oliver Bonk, D, London (OHL)

Jan. 9, 2005 | 6′ 2.0″ | 174 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Bonk has shown a lot of progression this season. He’s been an important player for a good London team playing a lot of minutes in all situations. The toolkit looks like an NHL defenseman. He’s a 6-foot-2 right shot with strong mobility and offensive touch. Bonk is able to skate pucks up ice, make some skilled plays, and shows good poise from the blue line. He’s not a standout with the puck, but he can be a decent puck mover at higher levels. Defensively he’s solid due to his feet and reach. Bonk isn’t overly physical but he can defend well.

26. Mikhail Gulyayev, D, Omsk (RUSSIA)

Apr. 26, 2005 | 5′ 10.0″ | 172 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 22

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Above NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Gulyayev has played versus men and juniors this season successfully in Russia. He has obvious offensive talents as he has clear NHL skating, hands and vision. Gulyayev is a highly intelligent and creative puck-mover and can make tough plays at a quick pace. He projects to run power plays at higher levels and be a point producer versus men. Due to his size, how well he’ll defend in the NHL will be a question. I’ve seen worse defenders, and with his great skating he should be able to hold up at higher levels even with his slight frame, but it will be a question he will have to answer repeatedly.

27. Lukas Dragicevic, D, Tri-City (WHL)

Apr. 25, 2005 | 6′ 1.0″ | 192 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 27

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Dragicevic has been scoring at a highly-impressive pace this season in the WHL while playing big minutes for Tri-City. Dragicevic is very good with the puck on his stick. He has good hands and better instincts and vision. He can run a power play like a pro. He shows the high-end poise to let plays develop and hold pucks under pressure to go with a strong point shot. The question with Dragicevic will be without the puck. He has a heavy skating stride. I don’t think he lacks compete, though some scouts I’ve talked to do. But his skating limits him in the defensive end.

28. Andrew Cristall, LW, Kelowna (WHL)

Feb. 4, 2005 | 5′ 9.5″ | 167 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 33

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Cristall is probably the most divisive player in this draft class. There will be fans and some scouts who see this ranking and think he’s much too low, but there will be scouts who will think he’s too high as well. He’s super talented offensively, and is one of the leading scorers in the WHL. He has puck-on-a-string type of hands, and routinely beats defenders with his stickhandling. He has a highly-imaginative offensive mind and great vision with the puck. His skill, vision and a legit shot from range make Cristall so dangerous on the power play and inside the offensive zone. The concerns come down to his frame and especially his skating. He lacks footspeed for the higher levels and has awkward skating mechanics. He works hard enough and doesn’t shy from going to the net, but I wouldn’t call him a high compete type. He will need to score a lot in the NHL to justify his various risk factors, and I think he will, but he may frustrate coaches too.

29. Bradly Nadeau, LW, Penticton (BCHL)

May. 5, 2005 | 5′ 10.0″ | 161 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: High-end

Analysis: Nadeau has dominated the BCHL the last two seasons. He’s done so through a versatile offensive toolkit. Nadeau has very good individual skill to couple with excellent speed. He’s quite dangerous in transition due to that combination. He can skate by and beat a lot defenders, but he’s also excellent creating with space. He sees the ice at a high level, making a lot of seam passes and making tough passes on the move. On the power play he can make a lot of plays, but it’s his shot that’s a real weapon. He has an excellent one-timer that projects to beat NHL goalies from distance. Nadeau isn’t the biggest winger, but the compete is good enough — especially with his skating and offense — that I think he plays and scores in the league.

30. Maxim Strbak, D, Sioux Falls (USHL)

Apr. 13, 2005 | 6′ 1.5″ | 205 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 29

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Below NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Strbak has been fine but not great with his club in the USHL, but was excellent for Slovakia at the world juniors. He’s a tall right shot who is mobile and makes a lot of stops due to his reach, feet, physicality and overall strong compete level. I don’t see him as a legit scorer and puck-mover in the NHL, but he’s good enough with the puck and can make enough plays to survive at higher levels. I think he will be a tough-minutes NHL defenseman who will have enough offense to play legit minutes.

31. Jakub Dvorak, D, Liberec (CZECHIA)

May. 25, 2005 | 6′ 5.0″ | 203 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Poor
Puck skills: Below NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Dvorak was having a strong season up until a broken clavicle kept him out for a few months including missing the world juniors. His offensive totals don’t jump out at you, but Dvorak is a solid two-way defenseman. He’s a big, smart defender who makes a lot of stops due to his reach, brain and work ethic. He’s not a punishing physical player, but Dvorak doesn’t shy from using his body and gives a strong effort defensively. He can pass pucks up ice well, but his pure skill/speed doesn’t stand out from a puck transporting perspective. He’s kind of a boring good player who will play real minutes as a pro.

32. Otto Stenberg, C, Frolunda Jr. (SWEDEN-JR.)

May. 29, 2005 | 5′ 11.25″ | 180 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 20

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Stenberg came out of the gates strong at the Hlinka in the summer but hasn’t been as strong since even though he’s been good. There is a lot to like about his game. He is a strong skater with good hands who can be a threat in transition. He’s not a dynamic offensive player, but he sees the ice well, can beat defenders one-on-one and can finish from range. Stenberg isn’t the biggest forward, but he gives an honest effort every night and doesn’t shy from going into traffic. He’s listed as a center but is likely a pro winger.

33. Adam Gajan, G, Chippewa (NAHL)

May. 6, 2004 | 6′ 2.5″ | 167 pounds | Catches left

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected starting goaltender

Skating: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average

Analysis: Gajan is a second year eligible who came over to the NAHL from Slovakia, and after a strong start in North America, got a late invite to Slovakia’s world juniors team, and promptly was named best goalie at the tournament. Gajan has clear NHL athleticism. He has an explosive lower half, with the power to make the toughest lateral saves at higher levels. He’s an aggressive goalie, almost to a fault., as he can take himself out of position too much. I do think he reads the play well and anticipates like a pro, but he will need to control his slides and aggression against better players. He has a lot of pro potential.

34. Ethan Gauthier, RW, Sherbrooke (QMJHL)

Jan. 26, 2005 | 5′ 11.25″ | 176 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 31

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Gauthier has been an important part of a top QMJHL team in Sherbrooke over the last year and was a top player for Canada at the Hlinka. He’s got a ton of skill and offensive IQ. He can beat defenders one-on-one at a high rate, making creative plays in small areas and showing he can create a lot for his teammates too. He has talent but also competes well, not shying away from physical play. Gauthier gets to the net and can create chances there. The issue is as a 5-foot-11 winger who lacks NHL quickness, the question whether his game translates to higher levels. His work ethic will help that cause, but he may always have to be proving himself due to his lack of top-end athleticism.

35. Michael Hrabal, G, Omaha (USHL)

Jan. 20, 2005 | 6′ 6.25″ | 209 pounds | Catches left

November 2022 Ranking: 21

Tier: Projected starting goaltender

Skating: Below NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average

Analysis: Hrabal has had some struggles of late after a scorching-hot start to the season, but still remains a very good goalie prospect. The tools are obvious as a 6-foot-6 goalie who moves quite well for his size. Hrabal also displays good sense and technique in his game, being square to the play often. He is efficient in his movements but can make the tough saves across his crease when he needs to. There are some long-range shots he likely wishes he could have back, and his consistency needs to improve, but he has all the ingredients to be an NHL goalie.

You know Lefty, there was a worth while read posted by Cam Charron Jan 26th about Boeser. Much better than the garbage articles you have been posting.

2023 NHL Draft prospects: Connor Bedard leads Corey Pronman’s midseason ranking.

Corey Pronman Jan 31, 2023

With the World Junior Championship in the rearview mirror, it is now 2023 NHL Draft season. In case you haven’t heard, Regina center Connor Bedard had a historic tournament, adding to his already tremendous resume. Bedard is the clear top prospect in this draft class and a potential franchise-changing player.

In November, I wrote that Michigan center Adam Fantilli was closing the gap with Bedard. While accurate based on what I was hearing from league sources at the time, I understand how that looks somewhat funny in hindsight. The gap between No. 1 and No. 2 is quite significant in this draft at the moment. The gap between No. 4 and No. 5 in this draft, though, is arguably just as wide. The 2023 NHL Draft possesses four outstanding prospects at the top in Bedard, Fantilli, Leo Carlsson and Matvei Michkov, names that would have challenged or been the favorite for the No. 1 overall pick in a number of other recent drafts.

The 2023 NHL Draft currently is a forward-heavy draft and a west-heavy draft. Only two defensemen are listed in my top 15. Five players playing in Western Canada are in the top 15. The 2023 NHL Draft looks like an above-average draft, mostly driven by the premium talent in the top four. After them the body of the draft looks mostly standard to other drafts in terms of depth and quality. We are still only in January; a lot will change over the coming months as the draft process ramps up.

Ranked players are placed into tiers and given tool grades. Tool grades are based on a scale with six separate levels, with an eye toward how this attribute would grade in the NHL (poor, below average, average, above average, high-end and elite). “Average” on this scale means the tool projects as NHL average, which is meant as a positive, not a criticism. Skating, puck skills, hockey sense and compete for every projected NHL player are graded. Shot grades are only included if a shot is notably good or poor.

Projected elite NHL player (Tier 1)
1. Connor Bedard, C, Regina (WHL)

Jul. 17, 2005 | 5′ 9.75″ | 185 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 1

Tier: Projected elite NHL player

Skating: Above NHL average
Puck skills: Elite
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: Elite

Analysis: Coming off one of the best individual world juniors ever by a player, there is no doubt who leads this draft class. Bedard is a potential franchise-changing No. 1 prospect. His skill and shot are legit game-breaking attributes. His ability to beat defenders one-on-one is among the best I’ve ever seen by a 17-year-old, and the pace at which he displays that elite skill is going to allow him to execute those types of skilled plays in the NHL. Bedard is a highly imaginative puckhandler and a very creative passer. That, combined with the fact his wrist shot is a top-tier NHL weapon from anywhere in the offensive zone, makes him a projected nightmare for NHL coaches to stop on the power play. The only downside to his game is his frame, which has some scouts wondering if he gets pushed off to the wing in the NHL. Given his success as a junior center, his strong skating and his high compete level, I think whoever drafts him will have to try him down the middle and move him to the wing if it doesn’t work. If he is a wing, he could still have a potential Patrick Kane/Nikita Kucherov type of impact on a franchise.


Projected bubble elite NHL player and NHL All-Star (Tier 2)
2. Adam Fantilli, C, Michigan (BIG10)

Oct. 12, 2004 | 6′ 2.0″ | 195 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 2

Tier: Projected bubble elite NHL player and NHL All-Star

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: High-end
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: High-end
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Fantilli’s world juniors was just OK, but he’s still having one of the best seasons ever in modern history by a first-year draft eligible in college. There’s so much to love about his NHL projection. He’s got a huge frame, skates well and competes hard. He wins a lot of battles and isn’t shy to use his big frame to lay out opponents. He has game-breaking puck skills and will be able to beat NHL opponents regularly with his puckhandling, especially given his speed and wing span. His playmaking isn’t the main thing that gets you excited about his game, but Fantilli can make difficult passes and has strong enough sense. His shot is also a threat from range. He checks every box and projects as a No. 1 center on a good NHL team.

3. Matvei Michkov, RW, Sochi (RUSSIA)

Dec. 9, 2004 | 5′ 10.0″ | 172 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 3

Tier: Projected bubble elite NHL player and NHL All-Star

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: High-end
Hockey sense: Elite
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Michkov hasn’t played a ton of hockey this season, but when he has, he’s looked his usual excellent self. He’s since being loaned from SKA to Sochi, where he’s getting regular KHL time and looks like he belongs at that level. He’s one of the most creative and intelligent offensive players I’ve seen in the last few years. He combines his incredible puck skills with a true elite goal-scoring instinct. He anticipates the play and attacks defenders differently than other forwards and always seems to find ways to figure into scoring chances despite not being the biggest or fastest. He can make plays at a high level, but Michkov is a finisher who will score a lot of goals as a pro. His skating is more elusive than fast and I wouldn’t call him a high-energy type, although he gets to the net to create. He’s signed in the KHL through the 2025-26 season.

4. Leo Carlsson, C, Orebro (SWEDEN)

Dec. 26, 2004 | 6′ 3.0″ | 198 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 4

Tier: Projected bubble elite NHL player and NHL All-Star

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: High-end
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Carlsson has looked excellent this season between the SHL and Sweden’s U20 team. He has elite skill, which when combined with his frame and a strong motor has allowed to him to be a very good player in a great league as a draft eligible. Carlsson routinely shows the ability to beat defenders with skill. He gets a ton of chances in the high-percentage areas, both due to his skill and his willingness to attack the net. He’s an excellent playmaker as well with a very imaginative offensive mind who can run a pro power play. His only drawback is a lack of true separation speed. I’ve seen worse feet on a 6-foot-3 guy, but he won’t be turning NHL defensemen around. He’s listed as a center, and has dabbled at it at the J20 level, but for the most part over the last two years I’ve seen him play wing.

Projected top-of-the-lineup player (Tier 3)
5. William Smith, C, Usa U-18 (NTDP)

Mar. 17, 2005 | 5′ 11.75″ | 178 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 5

Tier: Projected top of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: At the start of the season I would’ve said Smith would be the clear No. 1 prospect on this USNTDP club. I wouldn’t say that now, but Smith is still the guy and looks like a premium prospect. He is a dynamic offensive player who stands out every game with his talent. He has tremendous puck skills, vision and overall offensive creativity. He skates well and makes so many high-difficulty plays at a strong pace which lends well to his pro projection. Smith is a high-end passer who is also able to finish chances from the dots. The only real wart in his game is I wouldn’t call him an overly physical or competitive player, although I don’t think he lacks effort.

6. David Reinbacher, D, Kloten (SWISS)

Oct. 25, 2004 | 6′ 2.0″ | 185 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 9

Tier: Projected top of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Reinbacher has quickly drawn the interest of the NHL world with his very strong play in Switzerland’s top league, where he’s playing real minutes and scoring in a tough league as a draft eligible. He’s a mobile, 6-foot-2 right-shot defenseman who can contribute at both ends. Reinbacher’s gap control is strong, killing a lot of plays due to his feet. He can close on guys with his body too, and shows a high compete level to win back pucks. He’s able to both skate and pass pucks up ice. His offensive touch isn’t elite, but he has creativity with the puck and makes good decisions. There’s a lot of NHL in his game and he will be highly coveted in the draft.

7. Eduard Sale, LW, Brno (CZECHIA)

Mar. 10, 2005 | 6′ 2.0″ | 174 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 7

Tier: Projected top of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Sale has been up and down this season versus men in Czechia, but he was good with their U20 team and generally has looked very impressive over a long time span. Sale’s raw toolkit is very exciting. He’s 6 feet 2, skates quite well and has a ton of natural offensive abilities. He has the hands to beat NHL defensemen regularly and with his length and speed he’ll be able to drive play at even strength. Sale is a great passer who can run a power play well and hit seams at a strong clip. He can shoot the puck well enough but is better as a passer for me. His compete is OK. I wouldn’t call him a physical or high-energy type of player, but he shows enough courage to get to the net and doesn’t put in bad efforts regularly.

8. Danil But, LW, Yaroslavl (RUSSIA)

Feb. 15, 2005 | 6′ 5.0″ | 203 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 10

Tier: Projected top of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: But has been one of the better forwards in Russia’s junior league over the last two seasons. He’s a large, highly skilled forward who can score. But makes a lot of crafty plays with the puck in small areas, and with his massive wingspan he’s able to pull pucks past a lot of checkers. He can both make and finish plays well, but he’s more of a goal scorer. But isn’t blazing fast, but for a 6-foot-5 guy he can motor up the ice quite well, and he’ll be able to power his way to the net off rushes at higher levels. He gives a solid effort and is often involved in the play. Even though I don’t see a high-end trait other than his size, But checks every box and will help an NHL team win.

Projected bubble top and middle-of-the-lineup player (Tier 4)
9. Nate Danielson, C, Brandon (WHL)

Sep. 27, 2004 | 6′ 1.5″ | 185 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 11

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: After a slow start to the season, Danielson has looked a lot more like himself in recent months. He’s a well-rounded center who has a lot of NHL traits. He has the high-end skill and hockey sense to make a lot of plays inside the offensive zone, and also has the NHL body and skating ability to make you think he will be able to make those kinds of plays at higher levels. Danielson can drive the play and be relied on in any situation due to his brain, feet and compete down the middle. He’s a potential top-two line NHL center.

10. Oliver Moore, C, Usa U-18 (NTDP)

Jan. 22, 2005 | 5′ 11.0″ | 188 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 14

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: High-end
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Moore’s draft stock has continued to climb as the season has gone along. Part of that is due to how good he’s looked while not playing on the loaded top USNTDP line. Moore’s skating is electric and his edge work is NHL-elite caliber. He evades pressure so well and is able to go from a stop to a fast gear very quickly. He has very good hands to go with those feet and projects to get a ton of controlled zone entries in the NHL. I don’t think his playmaking is a major asset, but he can make some plays and looks comfortable on the power play both as a shooter and passer. Moore lacks size, but he’s a worker. He gets to the net, comes back hard on defense and coaches trust him in tough situations. He has a ton of NHL projectability.


11. Samuel Honzek, LW, Vancouver (WHL)

Nov. 12, 2004 | 6′ 3.5″ | 186 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 25

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Prior to a nasty injury suffered at the world juniors, Honzek’s game was trending in a very positive direction. In an already loaded WHL class, he was one of the top scorers in his first year in the league. His game is exciting from a pro projection standpoint. He’s a big forward who can skate well, which when combined with the offense he’s showing makes for a well-rounded player. I don’t think he’s amazing with the puck, but he has good hands and can make some tough plays. With his size, details and work ethic he can play any spot on a power play and is a solid defensive player too. He has all the tools of a future top-six forward.

12. Zach Benson, LW, Winnipeg (WHL)

May. 12, 2005 | 5′ 9.0″ | 160 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 12

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: High-end

Analysis: Benson has been on fire over the last few months and a leading player for a top CHL club. He’s got a ton of skill and creativity, he’s one of the better passers in junior and projects to be a major asset on an NHL power play. Benson lacks ideal size at 5-foot-9, but he plays quite hard. He’s relentless in puck battles and wins his fair share of them. His frame, combined with a lack of separation speed, is a concern though for his NHL projection even though he’s got good quickness in tight. His great compete makes you comfortable he will find a way to overcome those issues though, especially when you consider how much offense he brings to the table.

13. Dalibor Dvorsky, C, Aik (SWEDEN-2)

Jun. 15, 2005 | 6′ 1.0″ | 201 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 6

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Dvorsky has been up and down this season but his world juniors was some of his better hockey. Inside the offensive zone he can do a lot. He has excellent puck skills and can make checkers miss routinely. He can make tough plays and find seams. He excels as a goal scorer though with a wrist shot and one timer that he can often finish from range. Dvorsky’s compete is good enough, he wins puck battles and he isn’t shy from using his body, but I’d like to see less perimeter play from him and more consistency overall. His footspeed is also going to be an issue for higher levels.

14. Brayden Yager, C, Moose Jaw (WHL)

Jan. 3, 2005 | 5′ 10.5″ | 166 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 8

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: High-end

Analysis: Yager hasn’t scored a ton in the WHL yet this season, but he was arguably the best player at the Hlinka Gretzky this summer and has a rich overall track record. Yager is a player with a pro-style game. He plays with a lot of speed and energy, showing the ability to carry pucks up the ice and make skilled plays with pace. He’s not the biggest center, but Yager plays hard, showing a commitment to making plays without the puck and winning a lot of battles. His main offensive weapon is his shot, which is high end, but he does have the slick hands and vision to beat defenses in other ways. At his size there will be minor questions about whether he’s an actual NHL center but the way he plays makes me think he has a reasonable chance to stick down the middle.

15. Dmitriy Simashev, D, Yaroslavl (RUSSIA)

Feb. 4, 2005 | 6′ 4.0″ | 198 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 13

Tier: Projected bubble top and middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Simashev made a strong KHL team out of camp as a 17-year-old defenseman before being sent to junior where he’s looked good. He’s a toolsy defenseman as a 6-foot-4 blueliner who skates well for his size. He’s not dynamic offensively, but he has good puck skills, can make a solid outlet pass and makes some plays from the offensive blue line. Some may criticize Simashev’s production in junior, which is reasonable, but Loko is an elite junior team so I’m not overly concerned given who he has to fight with for ice time. He’s smooth and solid defensively, being good on his gaps and retrievals and doesn’t mind using his big frame. There’s a lot of NHL and pro upside in his game.

Middle-of-the-lineup player or starting goaltender (Tier 5)
16. Ryan Leonard, RW, Usa U-18 (NTDP)

Jan. 21, 2005 | 5′ 11.5″ | 190 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 16

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Leonard is a versatile winger with a lot of elements to his game that an NHL coach will covet. He’s a strong skater who competes well, with a direct style of play. He combines that with excellent hands and an ability to make highly-skilled plays with the puck at full speed. His playmaking isn’t great but there’s vision and finishing ability in his game to score at higher levels. Leonard works very hard and projects as a player who can help both special teams as a pro even if I don’t think he’ll be a standout at either end.

17. Matthew Wood, RW, Uconn (H-EAST)

Feb. 6, 2005 | 6′ 3.5″ | 193 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 15

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Poor
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Below NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Wood has been impressive for a 17-year-old in Hockey East. He’s a very gifted offensive player. Wood has excellent one-on-one skills and offensive IQ. He has the ability to hold onto pucks for an extra second and knows how to beat defenders. He also has an excellent wrist shot and one-timer, making him strong on the power play. Wood is a big winger as well, so the size/skill combo has a lot of upside. However, he’s got a sluggish skating stride, and tends to play too much on the perimeter which concerns scouts on how he’ll play versus men. We saw twice with Team Canada, when surrounded with top talent, he tended to slide down the lineup but still be a big part of their power play.

18. Colby Barlow, LW, Owen Sound (OHL)

Feb. 14, 2005 | 6′ 0.25″ | 193 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 19

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: High-end

Analysis: Barlow has scored a lot over his two OHL seasons and been one of the top point producers in the league this year. I see a lot of things in his game that will translate to higher levels. Barlow is a strong skater who gives an honest effort every night. He can kill penalties, and he can play at an NHL pace. Offensively he has excellent stick skills and a great shot. He’s a threat to score off the rush and from a standstill with his one-timer. Barlow’s playmaking isn’t his selling point, and if anything may hold him back it’s that, but he makes enough plays, and you don’t score as much as he does without hockey sense. He checks a lot of the boxes for the NHL.

19. Tanner Molendyk, D, Saskatoon (WHL)

Feb. 3, 2005 | 5′ 11.5″ | 182 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Above NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Molendyk has looked excellent in the WHL this season for Saskatoon and played a big role with Canada at the Hlinka as well. Moldenyk is a strong two-way defenseman despite not being the biggest defender. This is because of his excellent skating ability and strong work ethic. Molendyk’s edge work is very good. He closes on checks like a pro, and is able to evade pressure at a high level. His top speed is good, not great, but he can lead a rush. Molendyk has strong offensive instincts and skills, and can make plays from off the blue line and on the move. His size will be an issue as a defenseman in the NHL, but he plays hard and doesn’t shy from physical play.

20. Gabriel Perreault, RW, Usa U-18 (NTDP)

May. 7, 2005 | 5′ 10.75″ | 165 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 23

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Perreault has put up massive offensive number as part of that loaded top U.S. NTDP line with Smith and Leonard. He is a very skilled and intelligent winger who can make a ton of positive things happen inside the offensive zone. Perreault makes highly creative dekes and passes with the puck at a high rate, both off the perimeter and in small areas. His puck game is NHL power-play quality, but the debate with him is whether as a smaller winger without great speed is will he score in the NHL? I think because he competes enough, showing a willingness to get and create around the net, it will translate.

21. Quentin Musty, LW, Sudbury (OHL)

Jul. 6, 2005 | 6′ 1.75″ | 200 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: Not Ranked

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Musty has been very good in the OHL this season. He’s a player with a lot of offensive touch in his game. He’s a highly-skilled puckhandler who can make difficult plays with the puck at a high rate. He tries to make things happen and shows a strong level of creativity. Musty is a good passer who can hit open lanes and has the patience to pull up and make plays. His effort is fine, he can use his big body to win battles, but I wouldn’t call his compete an asset. He’s a one-way winger, which combined with his feet, is a concern for higher levels. The degree of skill and offense he’s showing this year along with a good sized frame, though, makes me think he will score in the NHL and help a club.

22. Calum Ritchie, C, Oshawa (OHL)

Jan. 21, 2005 | 6′ 1.75″ | 187 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 17

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Ritchie looks like he should be a good NHL player. When you see a 6-foot-2 center who can skate and handle the puck like him, he sticks out in a massive way and some of the plays he makes are distinct at the junior level. He looks like a top prospect, but it’s been quite stunning to see the number of OHL games where he has little impact. I’m confounded a bit by Ritchie. I don’t think he’s an amazing playmaker, but I see good hockey sense. He can be a bit perimeter at times, and is quite inconsistent, but I’ve seen solid efforts from him at times too. He should be better than this, the talent and track record make me still back him as a strong NHL prospect, even though it’s becoming tougher to do so.

23. Charlie Stramel, C, Wisconsin (BIG10)

Oct. 15, 2004 | 6′ 3.0″ | 212 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 18

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: Below NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Stramel has had a strange season. He struggled mightily to start his freshman season, and then went to the world juniors where he looked quite good and showed glimpses of the strong play he had at the U.S. NTDP. The tools remain highly intriguing. Stramel is a 6-foot-3 center who can skate well and plays a highly-physical brand of hockey. The degree of offense is the major question on his game. I think he has good hands and can create a little, but he lacks vision and won’t be a big-time scorer as a pro. Even with that in mind, a big, fast, competitive center with secondary offense is a highly valuable piece for an NHL team.

24. Axel Sandin Pellikka, D, Skelleftea (SWEDEN)

Mar. 11, 2005 | 5′ 10.75″ | 176 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Sandin Pellikka has trended up as the season has gone along. He’s put up big numbers in Sweden’s junior league, while also getting ice time for a top SHL team. He played well with Sweden’s U18 team and even better with their world juniors team. Sandin Pellikka is a highly-creative and intelligent puck-mover. He has excellent puck skills, showing the ability to beat opponents often with skill. He can improvise well with the puck, while also showing strong playmaking ability with the poise to make plays from the blue line at the highest levels. He skates well enough, and can make plays on the move creating offense off the rush and from blue line activations. Sandin Pellikka lacks ideal NHL size for a defenseman and I wouldn’t call him overly physical. His defensive play will be the main question especially as he gets closer to the NHL, but he has clear top-four D and NHL power-play offensive abilities.

25. Oliver Bonk, D, London (OHL)

Jan. 9, 2005 | 6′ 2.0″ | 174 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Bonk has shown a lot of progression this season. He’s been an important player for a good London team playing a lot of minutes in all situations. The toolkit looks like an NHL defenseman. He’s a 6-foot-2 right shot with strong mobility and offensive touch. Bonk is able to skate pucks up ice, make some skilled plays, and shows good poise from the blue line. He’s not a standout with the puck, but he can be a decent puck mover at higher levels. Defensively he’s solid due to his feet and reach. Bonk isn’t overly physical but he can defend well.

26. Mikhail Gulyayev, D, Omsk (RUSSIA)

Apr. 26, 2005 | 5′ 10.0″ | 172 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 22

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Above NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average

Analysis: Gulyayev has played versus men and juniors this season successfully in Russia. He has obvious offensive talents as he has clear NHL skating, hands and vision. Gulyayev is a highly intelligent and creative puck-mover and can make tough plays at a quick pace. He projects to run power plays at higher levels and be a point producer versus men. Due to his size, how well he’ll defend in the NHL will be a question. I’ve seen worse defenders, and with his great skating he should be able to hold up at higher levels even with his slight frame, but it will be a question he will have to answer repeatedly.

27. Lukas Dragicevic, D, Tri-City (WHL)

Apr. 25, 2005 | 6′ 1.0″ | 192 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 27

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Dragicevic has been scoring at a highly-impressive pace this season in the WHL while playing big minutes for Tri-City. Dragicevic is very good with the puck on his stick. He has good hands and better instincts and vision. He can run a power play like a pro. He shows the high-end poise to let plays develop and hold pucks under pressure to go with a strong point shot. The question with Dragicevic will be without the puck. He has a heavy skating stride. I don’t think he lacks compete, though some scouts I’ve talked to do. But his skating limits him in the defensive end.

28. Andrew Cristall, LW, Kelowna (WHL)

Feb. 4, 2005 | 5′ 9.5″ | 167 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 33

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: Above NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Cristall is probably the most divisive player in this draft class. There will be fans and some scouts who see this ranking and think he’s much too low, but there will be scouts who will think he’s too high as well. He’s super talented offensively, and is one of the leading scorers in the WHL. He has puck-on-a-string type of hands, and routinely beats defenders with his stickhandling. He has a highly-imaginative offensive mind and great vision with the puck. His skill, vision and a legit shot from range make Cristall so dangerous on the power play and inside the offensive zone. The concerns come down to his frame and especially his skating. He lacks footspeed for the higher levels and has awkward skating mechanics. He works hard enough and doesn’t shy from going to the net, but I wouldn’t call him a high compete type. He will need to score a lot in the NHL to justify his various risk factors, and I think he will, but he may frustrate coaches too.

29. Bradly Nadeau, LW, Penticton (BCHL)

May. 5, 2005 | 5′ 10.0″ | 161 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: NHL average
Shot: High-end

Analysis: Nadeau has dominated the BCHL the last two seasons. He’s done so through a versatile offensive toolkit. Nadeau has very good individual skill to couple with excellent speed. He’s quite dangerous in transition due to that combination. He can skate by and beat a lot defenders, but he’s also excellent creating with space. He sees the ice at a high level, making a lot of seam passes and making tough passes on the move. On the power play he can make a lot of plays, but it’s his shot that’s a real weapon. He has an excellent one-timer that projects to beat NHL goalies from distance. Nadeau isn’t the biggest winger, but the compete is good enough — especially with his skating and offense — that I think he plays and scores in the league.

30. Maxim Strbak, D, Sioux Falls (USHL)

Apr. 13, 2005 | 6′ 1.5″ | 205 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 29

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: Below NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Strbak has been fine but not great with his club in the USHL, but was excellent for Slovakia at the world juniors. He’s a tall right shot who is mobile and makes a lot of stops due to his reach, feet, physicality and overall strong compete level. I don’t see him as a legit scorer and puck-mover in the NHL, but he’s good enough with the puck and can make enough plays to survive at higher levels. I think he will be a tough-minutes NHL defenseman who will have enough offense to play legit minutes.

31. Jakub Dvorak, D, Liberec (CZECHIA)

May. 25, 2005 | 6′ 5.0″ | 203 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Poor
Puck skills: Below NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Dvorak was having a strong season up until a broken clavicle kept him out for a few months including missing the world juniors. His offensive totals don’t jump out at you, but Dvorak is a solid two-way defenseman. He’s a big, smart defender who makes a lot of stops due to his reach, brain and work ethic. He’s not a punishing physical player, but Dvorak doesn’t shy from using his body and gives a strong effort defensively. He can pass pucks up ice well, but his pure skill/speed doesn’t stand out from a puck transporting perspective. He’s kind of a boring good player who will play real minutes as a pro.

32. Otto Stenberg, C, Frolunda Jr. (SWEDEN-JR.)

May. 29, 2005 | 5′ 11.25″ | 180 pounds | Shoots left

November 2022 Ranking: 20

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: NHL average
Puck skills: NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average
Shot: Above NHL average

Analysis: Stenberg came out of the gates strong at the Hlinka in the summer but hasn’t been as strong since even though he’s been good. There is a lot to like about his game. He is a strong skater with good hands who can be a threat in transition. He’s not a dynamic offensive player, but he sees the ice well, can beat defenders one-on-one and can finish from range. Stenberg isn’t the biggest forward, but he gives an honest effort every night and doesn’t shy from going into traffic. He’s listed as a center but is likely a pro winger.

33. Adam Gajan, G, Chippewa (NAHL)

May. 6, 2004 | 6′ 2.5″ | 167 pounds | Catches left

November 2022 Ranking: Not Rated

Tier: Projected starting goaltender

Skating: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average

Analysis: Gajan is a second year eligible who came over to the NAHL from Slovakia, and after a strong start in North America, got a late invite to Slovakia’s world juniors team, and promptly was named best goalie at the tournament. Gajan has clear NHL athleticism. He has an explosive lower half, with the power to make the toughest lateral saves at higher levels. He’s an aggressive goalie, almost to a fault., as he can take himself out of position too much. I do think he reads the play well and anticipates like a pro, but he will need to control his slides and aggression against better players. He has a lot of pro potential.

34. Ethan Gauthier, RW, Sherbrooke (QMJHL)

Jan. 26, 2005 | 5′ 11.25″ | 176 pounds | Shoots right

November 2022 Ranking: 31

Tier: Projected middle of the lineup player

Skating: Below NHL average
Puck skills: Above NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average
Compete: Above NHL average

Analysis: Gauthier has been an important part of a top QMJHL team in Sherbrooke over the last year and was a top player for Canada at the Hlinka. He’s got a ton of skill and offensive IQ. He can beat defenders one-on-one at a high rate, making creative plays in small areas and showing he can create a lot for his teammates too. He has talent but also competes well, not shying away from physical play. Gauthier gets to the net and can create chances there. The issue is as a 5-foot-11 winger who lacks NHL quickness, the question whether his game translates to higher levels. His work ethic will help that cause, but he may always have to be proving himself due to his lack of top-end athleticism.

35. Michael Hrabal, G, Omaha (USHL)

Jan. 20, 2005 | 6′ 6.25″ | 209 pounds | Catches left

November 2022 Ranking: 21

Tier: Projected starting goaltender

Skating: Below NHL average
Hockey sense: NHL average

Analysis: Hrabal has had some struggles of late after a scorching-hot start to the season, but still remains a very good goalie prospect. The tools are obvious as a 6-foot-6 goalie who moves quite well for his size. Hrabal also displays good sense and technique in his game, being square to the play often. He is efficient in his movements but can make the tough saves across his crease when he needs to. There are some long-range shots he likely wishes he could have back, and his consistency needs to improve, but he has all the ingredients to be an NHL goalie.
- LeftCoaster

Pronman loves his sub-6 foot soft killed players so when he ranks a bigger player higher than consensus, I do take note of it.

Reinbacher and Danielsson

You need to cut back on the haterade. He's thanking me because he doesn't have a subscription and I shared the article with him and everyone else. So much anger inside of you.
- LeftCoaster

Thanks Lefty!

You know Lefty, there was a worth while read posted by Cam Charron Jan 26th about Boeser. Much better than the garbage articles you have been posting.
- manvanfan

You read an article that you thought was decent, but wouldn't share, you are such a thankless twat.

Pronman loves his sub-6 foot soft killed players so when he ranks a bigger player higher than consensus, I do take note of it.

Reinbacher and Danielsson
- Nucker101

I like both these players a lot, but I would be fine if the Canucks went Reinbacher, then Simashev.

If you are trying to fix the Defense, then fix the defense.

Edit, I also really like Dragicevic, need to see a bit more of him though.

Four questions the Vancouver Canucks can answer in the second half of the season.

By Cam Charron Feb 6, 2023

Despite the Canucks hitting their 41st game of the season midway through January, the All-Star break is a more natural midpoint of the season, since it allows us to take a step back, pause from the day-to-day grind and take stock of what we’ve learned about this team with a lengthy natural break in the schedule.

And when the Canucks return from the All-Star break tonight in New Jersey, we will see a much different team than the one we had for the 41st game of the season. The Canucks have made two major changes recently, replacing Bruce Boudreau with Rick Tocchet as coach and then trading Bo Horvat during the team’s bye week. It was also announced over the break that Ilya Mikheyev will miss the remainder of the season following knee surgery. With more trades sure to come, this team will look a lot different than it did before the break.

Now, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Canucks coaching switch is far too little, far too late to turn this team into one that has any hope of making the playoffs. Still, that doesn’t mean the final 33 games of the season need to be a solemn march to the draft lottery. The coaching change may be the precursor to identifying some tactical changes the Canucks need to make if this team is going to be more competitive next year or the following (I would caution against anybody expecting this team to be competitive until the ’24-25 season at the earliest, myself).

So, that being said, there are some burning questions I have that are due to be answered between now and the end of the season. While I could have written about 10 or 11 things I’ll be watching for, I capped it at four, mainly for length. These are the most pressing questions I have.

Can the Canucks fix their offence and create more scoring chances off the rush?
To me, the biggest weakness the Canucks have this season is that they’re too slow compared to their opposition. As I noted in my last piece, focusing on Brock Boeser, the Canucks are simply a poor team at creating any offence off the rush, because of the limited offensive instincts of their players but also because they don’t have a lot of chances to really enter the attacking zone with speed.

Usually, when a turnover or a shot against happens, there’s a brief window where the opposition defence is too disorganized, allowing good teams to break out with the puck quickly and force mismatches in the neutral zone. The Canucks don’t have the players to be able to take advantage of this window, and are usually about a second or two slower than their opponents at moving the puck forward.

This doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but the Canucks are just slow enough that they allow the defence to get organized.

Now, I’m not just spitting in the wind here, but this is a legitimate thing I’ve been tracking this season. When I track games, I’m able to categorize shots and scoring chances that a team takes into four major “types”:

• Rush — A shot taken within six seconds of a controlled offensive zone entry.
• Forecheck — A shot taken within four seconds of a dump-in recovery or opposition turnover within the defensive zone.
• Faceoff — A shot taken within 10 seconds of an offensive zone faceoff, won or lost.
• Cycle — Most other shots: shots that come after six seconds have elapsed since an offensive zone entry, four seconds since a turnover or 10 seconds since a faceoff.

If I total up all the scoring chances that the Canucks have taken (on first shots only, so not including rebounds) and allowed this season and compare the Canucks to the opponents, it’s not hard to see where the gap is: the Canucks have generally been about two scoring chances worse than their opponents each game:



The Canucks are roughly equal with their opponents when looking at the forecheck and cycle situations. They definitely allow a little bit more immediately following faceoffs than their opponents, but that adds up to less than one scoring chance of difference every two games. The bulk of the Canucks problems is off the rush.

So, the thing I’ll be watching for in the second half is whether the Canucks can get better off the rush: quicker to the puck following rebounds in the defensive zone, quicker to move the puck forward, better timing so that all the attackers are entering the offensive zone with speed, and better coordination within the offensive zone.

In the team’s most recent game against Columbus, I found an example of a play I’ve frankly seen too much this season. A promising rush is slow out of the zone, the Canucks still manage to enter with control, but the puck carrier is stuck on the wing with little support or open men, forcing either a turnover or an entry with no shot. On this particular sequence, Elias Pettersson’s bad pass back to the point simply left the offensive zone and the attack ended:

The Canucks both need to play with more speed and be more effective when they are able to play with speed. Even if it’s too late for the Canucks to get back toward a playoff race this year, it’s important to lay the foundation for good habits for next season, especially if some of the prospects are going to be joining the club between now and the end of the season.

Will the Canucks fix their breakouts and exit the defensive zone more often with control?
Further to their poor rush attack, an issue the Canucks have had is that their defencemen are unable to exit the defensive zone with control.

In my dataset, defencemen complete a pass out of the zone (or in an area where the player receiving the pass can easily skate the puck out) or carry the puck out on 51 percent of their exits, with the remaining exits either being dump-outs or bad passes that result in possession being contested in the neutral zone. The Canucks, however, are below average in this category, with their defencemen exiting with control just 49 percent of the time

When possession is contested in the neutral zone, it means you have less of an opportunity of sending the puck toward your opponent’s goal, which is necessary either to create offence or relieve pressure on the defence. This is a very simple, yet crucial aspect of the game, and think back to Tocchet’s second game with the club, last Wednesday in Seattle, when the game began with the Kraken continually bringing the puck in and all the Canucks were able to do was push the puck back over the blue line and change players.

The Canucks have just two regular defencemen that are higher than NHL average in this regard: Quinn Hughes, of course, is one of the best defencemen in the league at breaking the puck out of the zone, doing so with control 58 percent of the time, usually against pretty strong opposition and the opponents’ best forecheckers. Travis Dermott, who exits with control 62 percent of the time, technically has a higher number, but of course faces weaker forecheckers and also doesn’t touch the puck as often within his own end. Still, he’s been strong with the puck on his stick, and the Canucks need more of that. Other defencemen in a depth role, such as Riley Stillman (43 percent), Kyle Burroughs (45 percent), and Ethan Bear (42 percent), fail to get the puck moving in the right direction.

It’s still too early for us to have any knowledge of whether Tocchet will implement a system that overhauls the breakout and makes life easier for the defencemen, which usually happens when players play lower in the zone and outlet passes are shorter. The team has had three games (two against weak opponents) and they’ve only had one practice so far.

The Canucks are going to need more defencemen that can move the puck, and it’s important to know whether they already have some of those players on the roster, who just need to play in the right system to succeed.

How will the Canucks replace Horvat on the top power-play unit?
To me, the Horvat trade, rather than the coaching change, is going to represent the most dramatic facelift to the team. This will certainly be apparent at five-on-five, where Horvat was third on the team in points rate behind Pettersson and Andrei Kuzmenko. But it will be even more apparent at five-on-four, where Horvat’s play from the bumper was the focal point of the offence.

Despite the fact Horvat takes just 20 percent of the shots at five-on-four, the Canucks (usually J.T. Miller) set him up there numerous times per game, even if the opposition was able to disrupt the pass and not allow Horvat to get his signature snapper away from the high slot. The Canucks worked the play to Horvat so well, and he was so good at drawing defenders away, that it opened up a lot of opportunities for Kuzmenko to get tap-in goals from the front of the net, with the opposition defenders paying closer attention to Horvat. This goal against Nashville likely serves as the best example of the phenomenon:





Since the Canucks scored on just two of the 37 times Horvat attempted a shot from the slot preceded by a Miller pass, including the times the pass was broken up, it’s safe to say Horvat’s gravity will be missed more than his actual shot. While the Canucks power play has been struggling for the last month or so, the unit was undeniably one of the top 10 in the NHL.

So, who replaces Horvat in the middle? Well, there are three plausible options for me:

No. 1: Elevate Sheldon Dries from the second unit
Sheldon Dries plays the bumper spot on the second power-play unit, and his statistics and scoring chance contributions actually profile quite similarly to Horvat’s, both at five-on-five and at five-on-four. Dries’ preferred shot attempt from the high slot is a slap pass, rather than a one-timer snap shot:

Although Dries is also capable of finding open space and taking a shot, his shot doesn’t have the same bite as Horvat’s, as his release is a little slower, particularly on this recent example I found:

It’s plausible that Dries, who is fourth on the Canucks in five-on-four scoring chances taken per minute (behind Pettersson, Horvat and Boeser) and fourth in goals rate (behind Kuzmenko, Horvat, and Miller) would be able to produce at a decent-enough level that would allow the power play to stay strong in the second half of the season. Unfortunately, since Dries tends to look for shots coming from his right side rather than his left, this might leave Miller, who normally sets up along the left flank and is an excellent playmaker from that spot, a little out of the team’s five-on-four offence. Considering I think it’s crucial for this organization to rehabilitate Miller’s value so they can trade him at the draft before his no-trade clause kicks in on July 1, I think it’s necessary to ensure Miller is a big part of the power-play offence, which means either Dries will need to develop a better release or the Canucks can’t use him on the top unit.

No. 2: Just replace Horvat with the guy they acquired in that trade
The New York Islanders’ disastrous power play is likely what will hold them back from a playoff spot this season, and Anthony Beauvillier has mainly been a second-unit player for the Isles, if he plays on the power play at all. He has yet to record a single five-on-four point this season.

That said, from the ’19-20 to ’21-22 seasons, Beauvillier was a pretty strong power-play player. Among the top 256 forwards in five-on-four ice time over that period, Beauvillier was 73rd in goals rate, just behind Pettersson, and he didn’t do his damage from his shooting flank. He was a left shot that set up on the left side but had the ability to drift to the other side of the ice if the situation called for it. Watching three of his goals from last season shows he has almost the exact skill set the Canucks probably need to replace Horvat.

His strong release means he could alternate spots with Miller on the left flank and the bumper, with Miller acting more as a playmaker and Beauvillier as more of a shooter.

No. 3: Restructure the first unit entirely
Dries may seem like an unlikely candidate for an NHL top-unit power play, considering he’s been a career minor leaguer up until this season, but the Canucks’ talented left-shot players are all already on the top unit. That means the Canucks would have to completely restructure their personnel and formation to add another right-shot player to the mix, unless they go with Dries or Beauvillier.

While Boeser has been one of the top scorers leaguewide at five-on-four over the last three seasons, he isn’t taking slap shots from the left flank like he was in his first two seasons. He’s been a very productive net-front player, capitalizing on rebounds and tap-ins, finishing on passing plays close to the net, and setting up his teammates with close-range passes. Boeser has been very productive in this spot, even as he lost a good chunk of his everyday role on the top unit to both Kuzmenko and Conor Garland at various points this season.

With the Canucks having a space open up on the top unit, might it make sense to elevate Boeser back to his flank position, rotating both with Kuzmenko at the net front and Miller in the bumper spot? A right shot in the bumper may take away some of the playmaking potential from Miller, but may provide a better passing option for Pettersson, whose only passing target from his spot on the right flank is usually Kuzmenko in front of the net.

Either way, I’ll be watching carefully this week to see what the Canucks do to fill this hole. It may take a week or two before the team even settles on something.

Can the Canucks resuscitate the values of their trio of pricey wingers?
Finally, what the Canucks need more than anything in the second half of the season is to build up three wingers to a point where they can trade them for actual assets, or make a strong case for keeping them as the new core takes shape.

Those three wingers used to be a group of two, but now Beauvillier has joined the likes of Boeser and Garland as players whose price points and contract lengths don’t quite line up with the Canucks’ next contention window.

I argued two weeks ago (and the post is linked above) that the Canucks would be better off keeping Boeser rather than selling him at a loss, as the team isn’t in a position to benefit from any cap savings right now. The same goes for Garland and Beauvillier; the latter was likely more of a throw-in to the Horvat trade, a short-term deal for a middle-class salary range, to make the salary-cap math work on both sides.

Garland, to me, probably has the most value of the three. If you squint hard enough, you could argue Garland is actually having a halfway-decent season, but he’s getting unlucky with shooting percentages: His five-on-five on-ice shooting percentage of 6.7 percent is the lowest since his rookie year, and his individual five-on-five shooting percentage is a career-low 7.8 percent. He’s second on the team in shot rate and, by my own tracking, fifth among regular forwards (counting Horvat) in controlled offensive zone entry rate, third in controlled defensive zone exit rate, and third in turnovers that are forced in the attacking zone. The Canucks’ game plan with Garland needs to be patience and avoiding the urge to sell him to any buyer before his value recovers.

Beauvillier is a strong player and an everyday winger in the NHL, in addition to being a little overpaid. His deal expiring next summer means he may have some value in the summer or at the following trade deadline, especially if the Canucks are willing to retain some salary on the deal. However, he’s also a good investment opportunity for the club: Beauvillier’s shooting percentage over the last two years has been a huge step down from his first five years in the league (6.7 percent since the start of ’21-22, down from 12.3 percent from ’16-17 to ’20-21) even as his shot rate and assists rate have been steady. He’ll also be entering in a good situation: With Mikheyev out for the remainder of the season and Miller moving to centre permanently now that Horvat’s out, there are lots of minutes available for left-shot scorers on this team and he may even be a fit for that coveted spot next to Pettersson and Kuzmenko.

It’s imperative for this team to maximize the value of these three players, and Miller, so that the team enters the offseason from a position of strength.

Drance: Why winning the Bo Horvat trade requires embracing the pain of a rebuild.

By Thomas Drance Feb 3, 2023

At the outset of this week, the Vancouver Canucks traded their captain Bo Horvat.

The deal marked the end of an era for this hockey club. It also netted a return that seemed superficially underwhelming, but nonetheless brought back some meaningful, deeply intriguing future assets.

In the wake of this massive transaction — it’s one of the biggest trades the franchise has executed in a generation, and will probably hold up as the signature move of the 2023 NHL trade deadline — Vancouver’s long-term considerations look dramatically different than they did on Monday morning.

The Canucks’ prospect system, for example, something we’ve long cited as being catastrophically lean for a team this far from contention, is improved and is set to improve significantly over the next six to 18 months.

The club is now poised to make three first-round selections — including making a 2023 lottery pick — over the next two years. Add those three really good prospects to newly acquired centre Aatu Räty and a group of U23 forwards that also includes Vasili Podkolzin, Nils Höglander, Jonathan Lekkerimäki and Danilla Klimovich, and you’re on the verge of something that could be legitimately interesting.

The Canucks still need to add a ton of blue line talent to their system, obviously, but it’s amazing how much one big, future-looking trade can change the complexion of a team’s position. The club’s depth of potentially meaningful future assets suddenly seems genuine, for the first time in years.

Similarly, while trading Horvat has worsened this hockey team in the near term, the club has also ducked making a significant long-term commitment sure to ultimately land in excess of $7.5 million to a soon-to-be 28-year-old centre.

The cap benefit of dealing Horvat is limited short-term by having Anthony Beauvillier in the return. Retaining 25 percent of Horvat’s salary and acquiring Beauvillier means this is a cap-neutral trade over the balance of this season. Meanwhile, the 25-year-old Beauvillier will take up $4.15 million against the cap in the 2023-24 campaign.

Beyond next season, the club will have meaningful cap flexibility, however, and the Horvat trade is a major reason why.

Even if we assume that Elias Pettersson is going to cost $11 million on his third contract — he’s eligible to sign an extension as soon as this summer — the club should be able to count on $20 million in cap space in the summer of 2024, and even more if they’re able to move off of their commitments to Brock Boeser and Conor Garland.

J.T. Miller will be 31 for the 2024-25 campaign and Oliver Ekman-Larsson will be 32, which will be inconvenient if their effectiveness predictably wanes with age. Still, if Klimovich and Räty are even bottom-six contributors in the final years of their entry-level deals, the club could be very well positioned to rapidly improve themselves in a couple of years’ time.

Despite this rosy picture, the Horvat deal isn’t likely to be painless. There will be frustrating moments this season and next in which his absence is felt. The Canucks will play games in which the power play looks less dynamic without Horvat expertly finishing from soft spots in the opposition’s defensive coverage, or when a key defensive zone draw is lost, or when the club’s overall solidity is compromised absent their best matchup centre.

Ultimately though, trading Horvat has opened up a world of medium-term options to improve this hockey club. It’s the sort of deal this team has needed to be more decisive in making with other players — like Tanner Pearson and Miller — over the past three years.

Reflecting at greater length on this trade over the course of this week, my mind kept wandering back to the deal that originally brought Horvat to Vancouver at the 2013 NHL Entry Draft.

In Newark on that fateful afternoon, the club sold relatively high on Cory Schneider, netting a top-10 draft pick and using it to select their future captain from the London Knights with the ninth pick.

With apologies to the deal that shed Roberto Luongo’s contract or the relatively small deadline trades that sent Jannik Hansen and Alex Burrows out the door, the Schneider-for-Horvat deal was one of the only impact rebuilding trades the Canucks made, even as their competitive window shut toward the end of Henrik and Daniel Sedin’s career.

As time passed, it became clear that the original Horvat trade was a win for Vancouver. However, the problem with that deal was that even as Horvat improved and maximized what he could be as an impact NHL player, he didn’t have enough around him.

The club failed to net futures for players like Radim Vrbata and Dan Hamhuis. They ran at a draft pick deficit in a misguided pursuit of reclamation projects. They used their available cap space on overpriced, aging free-agent players rather than place value bets and accumulate futures by problem-solving for contending teams.

Worst of all, the Canucks were extraordinarily wasteful, making misguided, impatient moves like the trade that sent out promising young centre Jared McCann, with additional draft capital, for a “win-now” piece like Erik Gudbranson.

The franchise never really committed to stacking Schneider-for-Horvat-type trades on top of one another. Even as the club’s efforts to compete were so poor that they sunk to the bottom of the standings and found elite talents like Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes at the top of the draft order for their trouble, the franchise’s perpetual desperation got them stuck squarely in the middle.

The Horvat trade could represent a turning point for this franchise. The key is whether the club builds on the Horvat return with a possible Luke Schenn return. That would be a very good start.

Now sprinkle in a couple of smaller deadline deals involving expiring depth players, like, perhaps, Kyle Burroughs or Travis Dermott. Maybe even add an extra pick or two by placing Ilya Mikheyev and Pearson on Long-Term Injured Reserve and using that space to facilitate other trades by contending teams.

Then the club would be sucking diesel. A deadline like that would be perfect. It would represent the start of this Canucks hockey operations group laying down their shovels.

Or, perhaps, the Horvat trade will represent a one-off, like the Tyler Motte trade was at the 2022 NHL trade deadline, an example of a club situationally aware enough to avoid losing a pending unrestricted free agent for nothing in a season when they’re likely to miss the playoffs, but still intent on making moves like extending Miller and Andrei Kuzmenko with the short-term in mind.

Honestly, the latter scenario seems more likely. Will any longtime observers of how this club operates be surprised, for example, if despite having dealt Horvat, the team still opts to change gears and open extension talks with Schenn prior to the deadline?

That’s really the thing about making moves like the Horvat trade. It’s the sort of future-looking deal that is best when it’s a small part of a wider strategy.

The way to win the Horvat trade isn’t for the Islanders to struggle this season and next. That would help, but it’s beyond the control of the Canucks franchise now.

No, what matters now is for this club to commit to marshalling every resource at its disposal for the benefit of the future. If the Canucks are ambiguous in restocking instead, then the process is likely to fail.

This team isn’t close to being good enough short-term and is even further away without Horvat on the roster. That isn’t an easy reality to face, but in truth, it’s fine. In the big picture, taking precisely this sort of step back is required.

Now there’s only one way rational way forward. The question remains, does this club have the foresight and the appetite to embrace that pain and keep pushing through it?

Four questions the Vancouver Canucks can answer in the second half of the season.

By Cam Charron Feb 6, 2023

Despite the Canucks hitting their 41st game of the season midway through January, the All-Star break is a more natural midpoint of the season, since it allows us to take a step back, pause from the day-to-day grind and take stock of what we’ve learned about this team with a lengthy natural break in the schedule.

And when the Canucks return from the All-Star break tonight in New Jersey, we will see a much different team than the one we had for the 41st game of the season. The Canucks have made two major changes recently, replacing Bruce Boudreau with Rick Tocchet as coach and then trading Bo Horvat during the team’s bye week. It was also announced over the break that Ilya Mikheyev will miss the remainder of the season following knee surgery. With more trades sure to come, this team will look a lot different than it did before the break.

Now, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Canucks coaching switch is far too little, far too late to turn this team into one that has any hope of making the playoffs. Still, that doesn’t mean the final 33 games of the season need to be a solemn march to the draft lottery. The coaching change may be the precursor to identifying some tactical changes the Canucks need to make if this team is going to be more competitive next year or the following (I would caution against anybody expecting this team to be competitive until the ’24-25 season at the earliest, myself).

So, that being said, there are some burning questions I have that are due to be answered between now and the end of the season. While I could have written about 10 or 11 things I’ll be watching for, I capped it at four, mainly for length. These are the most pressing questions I have.

Can the Canucks fix their offence and create more scoring chances off the rush?
To me, the biggest weakness the Canucks have this season is that they’re too slow compared to their opposition. As I noted in my last piece, focusing on Brock Boeser, the Canucks are simply a poor team at creating any offence off the rush, because of the limited offensive instincts of their players but also because they don’t have a lot of chances to really enter the attacking zone with speed.

Usually, when a turnover or a shot against happens, there’s a brief window where the opposition defence is too disorganized, allowing good teams to break out with the puck quickly and force mismatches in the neutral zone. The Canucks don’t have the players to be able to take advantage of this window, and are usually about a second or two slower than their opponents at moving the puck forward.

This doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but the Canucks are just slow enough that they allow the defence to get organized.

Now, I’m not just spitting in the wind here, but this is a legitimate thing I’ve been tracking this season. When I track games, I’m able to categorize shots and scoring chances that a team takes into four major “types”:

• Rush — A shot taken within six seconds of a controlled offensive zone entry.
• Forecheck — A shot taken within four seconds of a dump-in recovery or opposition turnover within the defensive zone.
• Faceoff — A shot taken within 10 seconds of an offensive zone faceoff, won or lost.
• Cycle — Most other shots: shots that come after six seconds have elapsed since an offensive zone entry, four seconds since a turnover or 10 seconds since a faceoff.

If I total up all the scoring chances that the Canucks have taken (on first shots only, so not including rebounds) and allowed this season and compare the Canucks to the opponents, it’s not hard to see where the gap is: the Canucks have generally been about two scoring chances worse than their opponents each game:



The Canucks are roughly equal with their opponents when looking at the forecheck and cycle situations. They definitely allow a little bit more immediately following faceoffs than their opponents, but that adds up to less than one scoring chance of difference every two games. The bulk of the Canucks problems is off the rush.

So, the thing I’ll be watching for in the second half is whether the Canucks can get better off the rush: quicker to the puck following rebounds in the defensive zone, quicker to move the puck forward, better timing so that all the attackers are entering the offensive zone with speed, and better coordination within the offensive zone.

In the team’s most recent game against Columbus, I found an example of a play I’ve frankly seen too much this season. A promising rush is slow out of the zone, the Canucks still manage to enter with control, but the puck carrier is stuck on the wing with little support or open men, forcing either a turnover or an entry with no shot. On this particular sequence, Elias Pettersson’s bad pass back to the point simply left the offensive zone and the attack ended:

The Canucks both need to play with more speed and be more effective when they are able to play with speed. Even if it’s too late for the Canucks to get back toward a playoff race this year, it’s important to lay the foundation for good habits for next season, especially if some of the prospects are going to be joining the club between now and the end of the season.

Will the Canucks fix their breakouts and exit the defensive zone more often with control?
Further to their poor rush attack, an issue the Canucks have had is that their defencemen are unable to exit the defensive zone with control.

In my dataset, defencemen complete a pass out of the zone (or in an area where the player receiving the pass can easily skate the puck out) or carry the puck out on 51 percent of their exits, with the remaining exits either being dump-outs or bad passes that result in possession being contested in the neutral zone. The Canucks, however, are below average in this category, with their defencemen exiting with control just 49 percent of the time

When possession is contested in the neutral zone, it means you have less of an opportunity of sending the puck toward your opponent’s goal, which is necessary either to create offence or relieve pressure on the defence. This is a very simple, yet crucial aspect of the game, and think back to Tocchet’s second game with the club, last Wednesday in Seattle, when the game began with the Kraken continually bringing the puck in and all the Canucks were able to do was push the puck back over the blue line and change players.

The Canucks have just two regular defencemen that are higher than NHL average in this regard: Quinn Hughes, of course, is one of the best defencemen in the league at breaking the puck out of the zone, doing so with control 58 percent of the time, usually against pretty strong opposition and the opponents’ best forecheckers. Travis Dermott, who exits with control 62 percent of the time, technically has a higher number, but of course faces weaker forecheckers and also doesn’t touch the puck as often within his own end. Still, he’s been strong with the puck on his stick, and the Canucks need more of that. Other defencemen in a depth role, such as Riley Stillman (43 percent), Kyle Burroughs (45 percent), and Ethan Bear (42 percent), fail to get the puck moving in the right direction.

It’s still too early for us to have any knowledge of whether Tocchet will implement a system that overhauls the breakout and makes life easier for the defencemen, which usually happens when players play lower in the zone and outlet passes are shorter. The team has had three games (two against weak opponents) and they’ve only had one practice so far.

The Canucks are going to need more defencemen that can move the puck, and it’s important to know whether they already have some of those players on the roster, who just need to play in the right system to succeed.

How will the Canucks replace Horvat on the top power-play unit?
To me, the Horvat trade, rather than the coaching change, is going to represent the most dramatic facelift to the team. This will certainly be apparent at five-on-five, where Horvat was third on the team in points rate behind Pettersson and Andrei Kuzmenko. But it will be even more apparent at five-on-four, where Horvat’s play from the bumper was the focal point of the offence.

Despite the fact Horvat takes just 20 percent of the shots at five-on-four, the Canucks (usually J.T. Miller) set him up there numerous times per game, even if the opposition was able to disrupt the pass and not allow Horvat to get his signature snapper away from the high slot. The Canucks worked the play to Horvat so well, and he was so good at drawing defenders away, that it opened up a lot of opportunities for Kuzmenko to get tap-in goals from the front of the net, with the opposition defenders paying closer attention to Horvat. This goal against Nashville likely serves as the best example of the phenomenon:





Since the Canucks scored on just two of the 37 times Horvat attempted a shot from the slot preceded by a Miller pass, including the times the pass was broken up, it’s safe to say Horvat’s gravity will be missed more than his actual shot. While the Canucks power play has been struggling for the last month or so, the unit was undeniably one of the top 10 in the NHL.

So, who replaces Horvat in the middle? Well, there are three plausible options for me:

No. 1: Elevate Sheldon Dries from the second unit
Sheldon Dries plays the bumper spot on the second power-play unit, and his statistics and scoring chance contributions actually profile quite similarly to Horvat’s, both at five-on-five and at five-on-four. Dries’ preferred shot attempt from the high slot is a slap pass, rather than a one-timer snap shot:

Although Dries is also capable of finding open space and taking a shot, his shot doesn’t have the same bite as Horvat’s, as his release is a little slower, particularly on this recent example I found:

It’s plausible that Dries, who is fourth on the Canucks in five-on-four scoring chances taken per minute (behind Pettersson, Horvat and Boeser) and fourth in goals rate (behind Kuzmenko, Horvat, and Miller) would be able to produce at a decent-enough level that would allow the power play to stay strong in the second half of the season. Unfortunately, since Dries tends to look for shots coming from his right side rather than his left, this might leave Miller, who normally sets up along the left flank and is an excellent playmaker from that spot, a little out of the team’s five-on-four offence. Considering I think it’s crucial for this organization to rehabilitate Miller’s value so they can trade him at the draft before his no-trade clause kicks in on July 1, I think it’s necessary to ensure Miller is a big part of the power-play offence, which means either Dries will need to develop a better release or the Canucks can’t use him on the top unit.

No. 2: Just replace Horvat with the guy they acquired in that trade
The New York Islanders’ disastrous power play is likely what will hold them back from a playoff spot this season, and Anthony Beauvillier has mainly been a second-unit player for the Isles, if he plays on the power play at all. He has yet to record a single five-on-four point this season.

That said, from the ’19-20 to ’21-22 seasons, Beauvillier was a pretty strong power-play player. Among the top 256 forwards in five-on-four ice time over that period, Beauvillier was 73rd in goals rate, just behind Pettersson, and he didn’t do his damage from his shooting flank. He was a left shot that set up on the left side but had the ability to drift to the other side of the ice if the situation called for it. Watching three of his goals from last season shows he has almost the exact skill set the Canucks probably need to replace Horvat.

His strong release means he could alternate spots with Miller on the left flank and the bumper, with Miller acting more as a playmaker and Beauvillier as more of a shooter.

No. 3: Restructure the first unit entirely
Dries may seem like an unlikely candidate for an NHL top-unit power play, considering he’s been a career minor leaguer up until this season, but the Canucks’ talented left-shot players are all already on the top unit. That means the Canucks would have to completely restructure their personnel and formation to add another right-shot player to the mix, unless they go with Dries or Beauvillier.

While Boeser has been one of the top scorers leaguewide at five-on-four over the last three seasons, he isn’t taking slap shots from the left flank like he was in his first two seasons. He’s been a very productive net-front player, capitalizing on rebounds and tap-ins, finishing on passing plays close to the net, and setting up his teammates with close-range passes. Boeser has been very productive in this spot, even as he lost a good chunk of his everyday role on the top unit to both Kuzmenko and Conor Garland at various points this season.

With the Canucks having a space open up on the top unit, might it make sense to elevate Boeser back to his flank position, rotating both with Kuzmenko at the net front and Miller in the bumper spot? A right shot in the bumper may take away some of the playmaking potential from Miller, but may provide a better passing option for Pettersson, whose only passing target from his spot on the right flank is usually Kuzmenko in front of the net.

Either way, I’ll be watching carefully this week to see what the Canucks do to fill this hole. It may take a week or two before the team even settles on something.

Can the Canucks resuscitate the values of their trio of pricey wingers?
Finally, what the Canucks need more than anything in the second half of the season is to build up three wingers to a point where they can trade them for actual assets, or make a strong case for keeping them as the new core takes shape.

Those three wingers used to be a group of two, but now Beauvillier has joined the likes of Boeser and Garland as players whose price points and contract lengths don’t quite line up with the Canucks’ next contention window.

I argued two weeks ago (and the post is linked above) that the Canucks would be better off keeping Boeser rather than selling him at a loss, as the team isn’t in a position to benefit from any cap savings right now. The same goes for Garland and Beauvillier; the latter was likely more of a throw-in to the Horvat trade, a short-term deal for a middle-class salary range, to make the salary-cap math work on both sides.

Garland, to me, probably has the most value of the three. If you squint hard enough, you could argue Garland is actually having a halfway-decent season, but he’s getting unlucky with shooting percentages: His five-on-five on-ice shooting percentage of 6.7 percent is the lowest since his rookie year, and his individual five-on-five shooting percentage is a career-low 7.8 percent. He’s second on the team in shot rate and, by my own tracking, fifth among regular forwards (counting Horvat) in controlled offensive zone entry rate, third in controlled defensive zone exit rate, and third in turnovers that are forced in the attacking zone. The Canucks’ game plan with Garland needs to be patience and avoiding the urge to sell him to any buyer before his value recovers.

Beauvillier is a strong player and an everyday winger in the NHL, in addition to being a little overpaid. His deal expiring next summer means he may have some value in the summer or at the following trade deadline, especially if the Canucks are willing to retain some salary on the deal. However, he’s also a good investment opportunity for the club: Beauvillier’s shooting percentage over the last two years has been a huge step down from his first five years in the league (6.7 percent since the start of ’21-22, down from 12.3 percent from ’16-17 to ’20-21) even as his shot rate and assists rate have been steady. He’ll also be entering in a good situation: With Mikheyev out for the remainder of the season and Miller moving to centre permanently now that Horvat’s out, there are lots of minutes available for left-shot scorers on this team and he may even be a fit for that coveted spot next to Pettersson and Kuzmenko.

It’s imperative for this team to maximize the value of these three players, and Miller, so that the team enters the offseason from a position of strength.
- LeftCoaster

Thanks Lefty.

The blogger apparently only figured out this season, that the Canucks are too slow.

NHL prospect trade board: Which top assets could contenders move at the deadline?

By Corey Pronman Feb 7, 2023

Today I’m going to highlight the top young assets available on contenders heading into the 2023 NHL trade deadline. To define a “contender,” I’m using the teams that have a five percent chance or better of winning the Cup based on Dom’s model. That comprises Boston, Carolina, Colorado, Dallas, Edmonton, New Jersey, Toronto and Tampa Bay. I selectively excluded a few players like Luke Hughes, Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway due to them being on the roster or having a good chance to be on the playoff roster for their respective clubs or a recent No. 2 pick like Simon Nemec that I can’t see being on the market. Available doesn’t mean I’ve heard they’re being shopped, but I think there’s at least a plausible chance they could be moved.

1. Alexander Nikishin, LHD, Carolina
It never hurts to ask. Do I think it would be wise to trade a big, mobile, physical 21-year-old defenseman who is top 10 in KHL scoring as of this writing? No, it would be a terrible idea. But every team that calls Carolina will likely at least inquire about the possibility of getting Nikishin and if there’s a chance Carolina feels they can’t get him signed then maybe he could be moved.

2. Logan Stankoven, C, Dallas
Stankoven has arguably been the best player in junior this year not named Connor Bedard. He’s an electric offensive talent between his great skating, skill, and goal-scoring ability to go with a tenacious compete level. He has everything except size. The second-round pick by Dallas in 2021 looks like someone who could be in the league soon, and it would be quite a piece to move but Dallas also has a very strong forward group already.


Logan Stankoven. (Jerome Miron / USA Today)
3. Matthew Knies, LW, Toronto
Knies is an interesting prospect for this type of article because I see a world where he’s helping Toronto in the playoffs. He has a big, thick frame to go with his great skill and work ethic, and could realistically make the jump this spring and be a decent top-nine winger for Toronto. He will be the name every team asks about in trade calls though, especially if someone is offering a major upgrade.

4. Lian Bichsel, LHD, Dallas
Bichsel was very good at the World Juniors and was Dallas’ most recent first-round pick. He’s a big, mobile, highly physical defenseman whose offense will be secondary as a pro. He’s a top NHL prospect, but his NHL timeline is likely the furthest out compared to Stankoven or Thomas Harley in the Stars system which is something to consider on the trade front.

5. Shakir Mukhamadullin, LHD, New Jersey
Mukhamadullin is an interesting trade chip. He’s a very good player. He’s a big defenseman who skates well and has shown offense at the KHL level too. He projects as a top-four NHL defenseman, but New Jersey has Luke Hughes and Simon Nemec coming and already has a strong club. Mukhamadullin may end up the odd man out in the roster battle and therefore makes a lot of sense to use in a deadline move.

6. Colorado and Edmonton’s first-round pick in the 2023 NHL Draft
I’m making a delineation between Colorado and Edmonton’s first-round pick and the other clubs because as of now they are picking closer to 20 presuming they don’t make the final four or go on a big run in the final months, which is quite possible. Putting these picks above some recent first-round picks is not a commentary on the 2023 draft. I think by the time you get to the 20th pick in the draft it will start to look like a standard draft. But for a team drafting around there, they will likely think they can get a premium name on their list given they will probably have someone in their personal top 10-12 on the board still.

7. Alexander Holtz, RW, New Jersey
Holtz has often been a healthy scratch this season for New Jersey so I’m skeptical he’s part of their current playoff plans. It would be quite a move to deal the 7th overall pick from the 2020 NHL Draft, but his development has stagnated recently. I do think he’s a very good young player, he’s got a ton of skill and an elite shot, but his lack of pace and energy are concerns. New Jersey has a very good group of forwards, and if they don’t see a realistic path to Holtz being a part of their everyday top nine as of next season, then he could be a trade chip.

8. Reid Schaefer, LW, Edmonton
Schaefer has been an important part of a top WHL club in Seattle this season. He is a player type teams will covet as a big, physical winger who may not have amazing offensive abilities or footspeed but projects to score at a decent clip as a pro. He’s still quite young as a 2022 draftee, which could make him more appealing as a trade chip for the Oilers given they are trying to contend now.

9. Thomas Harley, LHD, Dallas
Harley hasn’t broken through yet in the NHL, but he has been a top defenseman in the AHL this season. A defender with his size and mobility who shows some offense versus men will be a priority ask for clubs and he looks like a potential second-pair defenseman in the NHL one day. I’m sure Stars fans would like to see both him and Bichsel on their blue line for a decade though.

10. Xavier Bourgault, RW, Edmonton
Bourgault is a highly skilled winger. He lit up the QMJHL due to his great skill and offensive sense. His first-year pro has gone well. The scoring hasn’t been there in huge numbers but he’s one of the youngest players in the AHL. Given their need for secondary scoring, I could see this being a tough piece for the Oilers to let go of, but Bourgault will be someone teams will ask about.

11. Boston, Carolina, New Jersey, and Toronto’s first-round pick in the 2023 NHL Draft
Using the same analysis as above, while I have high prospect grades on the players below these picks, any team using a late first rounder will likely have that prospect on the top 20 of their list and think they have a good chance to bet on a strong middle-six forward or a second-pair defenseman.

12. Scott Morrow, RHD, Carolina
Morrow is having a down year compared to his 2021-22 season, but he remains a strong prospect and a good trade chip for Carolina. He’s a good-sized defenseman who can skate, is highly skilled, has great offensive hockey sense and can score goals. The issue is he’s not a great defender but his offensive tools are so good I think another team would covet him.

13. Nolan Foote, LW, New Jersey
Foote has already been part of one deadline deal already, so it’s not much of a take that he fits the criteria for a trade. He’s a good player. He’s big, he works hard, can score goals and has good hockey sense, but his skating limits him so there is some concern about whether he can handle the NHL pace. I see enough of a player there to where I think he can, but it hasn’t happened yet and the clock is ticking on the 22-year-old.

14. Mavrik Bourque, C, Dallas
Bourque’s first pro season started off bumpy, but he’s been scoring more lately and projects to have offense versus men. He has a lot of skill and arguably better hockey sense. He can run a power play and create a lot in the offensive zone. Bourque lacks ideal size and skating for the NHL though. He is a more typical trade piece in that he has a lot of potential, but isn’t a sure thing either.

15. Pyotr Kochetkov, G, Carolina
With both Frederik Andersen and Antti Raanta set to become free agents this season, I don’t see Kochetkov being moved. He has shown he can look like an NHL goalie though in a limited sample. His hockey sense is just fine but he’s a tremendous athlete and looks like a good pro goaltender.

16. Arseni Gritsyuk, RW, New Jersey
Gritsyuk has been quite good in the KHL over the last two seasons. He’s a strong skating winger with very good offensive skills and a goal-scoring threat from range. He looks like a very nice 5th round pick. For New Jersey, they need to ask though does he have a real future in their top nine or just as quality depth? If Holtz can’t make their team can Gritsyuk? Maybe, maybe not. But those are questions I think management needs to ponder ahead of this deadline, especially as Gritsyuk’s KHL deal is set to expire this spring.

17. Topi Niemela, RHD, Toronto
Niemela’s offense is down this season in Finland, but I do think if he was on the market there would still be interest. He has excellent two-way hockey sense and is a good skater. He is undersized though and not that dynamic for a smaller defenseman so there is some risk. Those kinds of prospects tend to be part of deadline deals.

Other assets of interest (alphabetical order):
Kevin Bahl LHD, New Jersey

John Beecher, C, Boston

Jackson Blake, RW, Carolina

Seamus Casey, RHD, New Jersey

Nico Daws/Akira Schmid, G, New Jersey

Jack Drury, C, Carolina

Jack Finley, C, Tampa Bay

Jean-Luc Foudy, RW, Colorado

Gage Goncalves, LW, Tampa Bay

Noel Gunler, RW, Carolina

Dennis Hildeby, G, Toronto

Isaac Howard, LW, Tampa Bay

Niko Huuhtanen, RW, Tampa Bay

Raphael Lavoie, RW, Edmonton

Mason Lohrei, LHD, Boston

Fabian Lysell, RW, Boston

Fraser Minten, C, Toronto

Nikita Okhotyuk, LHD, New Jersey

Oskar Olausson, RW, Colorado

Ryan Suzuki, C, Carolina

Jack Thompson, RHD, Tampa Bay

Carolina, Edmonton and New Jersey’s second-round pick in the 2023 NHL Draft

Drance: Why winning the Bo Horvat trade requires embracing the pain of a rebuild.

By Thomas Drance Feb 3, 2023

At the outset of this week, the Vancouver Canucks traded their captain Bo Horvat.

The deal marked the end of an era for this hockey club. It also netted a return that seemed superficially underwhelming, but nonetheless brought back some meaningful, deeply intriguing future assets.

In the wake of this massive transaction — it’s one of the biggest trades the franchise has executed in a generation, and will probably hold up as the signature move of the 2023 NHL trade deadline — Vancouver’s long-term considerations look dramatically different than they did on Monday morning.

The Canucks’ prospect system, for example, something we’ve long cited as being catastrophically lean for a team this far from contention, is improved and is set to improve significantly over the next six to 18 months.

The club is now poised to make three first-round selections — including making a 2023 lottery pick — over the next two years. Add those three really good prospects to newly acquired centre Aatu Räty and a group of U23 forwards that also includes Vasili Podkolzin, Nils Höglander, Jonathan Lekkerimäki and Danilla Klimovich, and you’re on the verge of something that could be legitimately interesting.

The Canucks still need to add a ton of blue line talent to their system, obviously, but it’s amazing how much one big, future-looking trade can change the complexion of a team’s position. The club’s depth of potentially meaningful future assets suddenly seems genuine, for the first time in years.

Similarly, while trading Horvat has worsened this hockey team in the near term, the club has also ducked making a significant long-term commitment sure to ultimately land in excess of $7.5 million to a soon-to-be 28-year-old centre.

The cap benefit of dealing Horvat is limited short-term by having Anthony Beauvillier in the return. Retaining 25 percent of Horvat’s salary and acquiring Beauvillier means this is a cap-neutral trade over the balance of this season. Meanwhile, the 25-year-old Beauvillier will take up $4.15 million against the cap in the 2023-24 campaign.

Beyond next season, the club will have meaningful cap flexibility, however, and the Horvat trade is a major reason why.

Even if we assume that Elias Pettersson is going to cost $11 million on his third contract — he’s eligible to sign an extension as soon as this summer — the club should be able to count on $20 million in cap space in the summer of 2024, and even more if they’re able to move off of their commitments to Brock Boeser and Conor Garland.

J.T. Miller will be 31 for the 2024-25 campaign and Oliver Ekman-Larsson will be 32, which will be inconvenient if their effectiveness predictably wanes with age. Still, if Klimovich and Räty are even bottom-six contributors in the final years of their entry-level deals, the club could be very well positioned to rapidly improve themselves in a couple of years’ time.

Despite this rosy picture, the Horvat deal isn’t likely to be painless. There will be frustrating moments this season and next in which his absence is felt. The Canucks will play games in which the power play looks less dynamic without Horvat expertly finishing from soft spots in the opposition’s defensive coverage, or when a key defensive zone draw is lost, or when the club’s overall solidity is compromised absent their best matchup centre.

Ultimately though, trading Horvat has opened up a world of medium-term options to improve this hockey club. It’s the sort of deal this team has needed to be more decisive in making with other players — like Tanner Pearson and Miller — over the past three years.

Reflecting at greater length on this trade over the course of this week, my mind kept wandering back to the deal that originally brought Horvat to Vancouver at the 2013 NHL Entry Draft.

In Newark on that fateful afternoon, the club sold relatively high on Cory Schneider, netting a top-10 draft pick and using it to select their future captain from the London Knights with the ninth pick.

With apologies to the deal that shed Roberto Luongo’s contract or the relatively small deadline trades that sent Jannik Hansen and Alex Burrows out the door, the Schneider-for-Horvat deal was one of the only impact rebuilding trades the Canucks made, even as their competitive window shut toward the end of Henrik and Daniel Sedin’s career.

As time passed, it became clear that the original Horvat trade was a win for Vancouver. However, the problem with that deal was that even as Horvat improved and maximized what he could be as an impact NHL player, he didn’t have enough around him.

The club failed to net futures for players like Radim Vrbata and Dan Hamhuis. They ran at a draft pick deficit in a misguided pursuit of reclamation projects. They used their available cap space on overpriced, aging free-agent players rather than place value bets and accumulate futures by problem-solving for contending teams.

Worst of all, the Canucks were extraordinarily wasteful, making misguided, impatient moves like the trade that sent out promising young centre Jared McCann, with additional draft capital, for a “win-now” piece like Erik Gudbranson.

The franchise never really committed to stacking Schneider-for-Horvat-type trades on top of one another. Even as the club’s efforts to compete were so poor that they sunk to the bottom of the standings and found elite talents like Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes at the top of the draft order for their trouble, the franchise’s perpetual desperation got them stuck squarely in the middle.

The Horvat trade could represent a turning point for this franchise. The key is whether the club builds on the Horvat return with a possible Luke Schenn return. That would be a very good start.

Now sprinkle in a couple of smaller deadline deals involving expiring depth players, like, perhaps, Kyle Burroughs or Travis Dermott. Maybe even add an extra pick or two by placing Ilya Mikheyev and Pearson on Long-Term Injured Reserve and using that space to facilitate other trades by contending teams.

Then the club would be sucking diesel. A deadline like that would be perfect. It would represent the start of this Canucks hockey operations group laying down their shovels.

Or, perhaps, the Horvat trade will represent a one-off, like the Tyler Motte trade was at the 2022 NHL trade deadline, an example of a club situationally aware enough to avoid losing a pending unrestricted free agent for nothing in a season when they’re likely to miss the playoffs, but still intent on making moves like extending Miller and Andrei Kuzmenko with the short-term in mind.

Honestly, the latter scenario seems more likely. Will any longtime observers of how this club operates be surprised, for example, if despite having dealt Horvat, the team still opts to change gears and open extension talks with Schenn prior to the deadline?

That’s really the thing about making moves like the Horvat trade. It’s the sort of future-looking deal that is best when it’s a small part of a wider strategy.

The way to win the Horvat trade isn’t for the Islanders to struggle this season and next. That would help, but it’s beyond the control of the Canucks franchise now.

No, what matters now is for this club to commit to marshalling every resource at its disposal for the benefit of the future. If the Canucks are ambiguous in restocking instead, then the process is likely to fail.

This team isn’t close to being good enough short-term and is even further away without Horvat on the roster. That isn’t an easy reality to face, but in truth, it’s fine. In the big picture, taking precisely this sort of step back is required.

Now there’s only one way rational way forward. The question remains, does this club have the foresight and the appetite to embrace that pain and keep pushing through it?
- LeftCoaster

It is sad to see, some really good teams, having so many decent prospects, yet the Canucks, who have been a bad team for so long, have next to nothing.

JFC Moby Cock much?

Reading this thread like:

Canucks stock watch: Player deployment trends taking shape under Rick Tocchet.

By Harman Dayal & Thomas Drance
Feb 13, 2023

The first thing that changes when a new head coach takes over behind an NHL team’s bench is how various players on that team are deployed.

How a player is viewed internally, their ice time, situational usage — these are the items that instantly come into flux when a new bench boss comes to town.

The Vancouver Canucks are only seven games into the Rick Tocchet era, and the club has only been able to hold four practices. These are very early days, obviously.

The systems overhaul that we’ll ultimately expect under Tocchet isn’t quite installed yet.

The team appears to be playing better — and is controlling play extremely well at five-on-five since Tocchet took over — but the sample size is too small to be meaningful yet. And anyway, the short-term adrenaline burst that NHL teams tend to receive after a coaching change will subside in the near future.

By season’s end, we’ll have a better sense of what a Tocchet-coached Canucks team really looks like — from both a work rate and Xs and Os perspective.

In the meantime, Tocchet’s impact on player deployment has been significant and immediate. Who is on the ice, how often are they on the ice and when — these questions form the basis for an NHL coach’s most discernible quantitative impact on their team’s results.

So who is Tocchet leaning on more than Bruce Boudreau did? Who appears to be falling out of favour, or at least trending in the wrong direction, three weeks into Tocchet’s tenure? It’s early yet, of course, but we figured we’d best point out some early player deployment trends that are beginning to take shape under Tocchet. It’s time for Canucks stock watch: Rick Tocchet edition.

Rising
J.T. Miller
J.T. Miller’s case is a bit of an odd one.

Since Tocchet arrived to coach the Canucks on Jan. 23, Miller has moved to centre full-time and been productive — seven points in seven games, with four of those points coming at even strength — even though his ice time has fallen pretty dramatically at five-on-five.

Miller is one of the most heavily used players in the NHL over the past few seasons, with his usage cresting last year. He was one of the five most-used forwards in the entire league during the 2021-22 campaign, and was trending to fall easily within the top 10 again this season.

Tocchet cited Miller’s minutes as something that needed to be more carefully managed before he’d ever coached a game for the Canucks. And through seven games, anyway, he’s delivered on that plan with his deployment of Miller.

In seven games under Tocchet, Miller’s even-strength ice time has fallen from a team-leading 15:16 per game to 13:40 per game — which ranks sixth among Canucks players in Tocchet’s small sample tenure. His special teams usage remains heavy and, so far, unchanged.

While a 100-seconds-per-game drop might not seem like a lot, in NHL terms it’s significant. Under Tocchet, Miller is effectively playing a normal second-line role, as opposed to slotting in as a singular all-situations workhorse the way he has for much of his Canucks tenure.

This drop in ice time has also resulted in a sharp drop in the quality of competition that Miller appears to be facing on a nightly basis. On the club’s recent road trip — and granted, Tocchet and his staff don’t have full control over matchups outside of open play on the road — Miller regularly took secondary or even tertiary matchups. He saw a steady diet of minutes head-to-head with Andrew Copp, J.G. Pageau and Vincent Trocheck, while Elias Pettersson drew far more minutes against Dylan Larkin, Bo Horvat and Mika Zibanejad. We’ll see if that trend continues as the Canucks return home.

The softer competition Miller is facing has been matched by the territorial bent of his deployment. Since Tocchet took over behind the bench, Miller has started only six five-on-five shifts in the defensive end of the rink — in contrast, Pettersson has started 13 times in the defensive zone and Curtis Lazar has started 15 times in his own end. Miller’s offensive-zone start percentage has jumped from a neutral 52 percent under Boudreau, to a positively sheltered 77 percent under Tocchet.

Although he’s moved back to centre full-time since the coaching change, Miller’s more prescribed usage has paid dividends. Miller is currently enjoying his best two-way stretch of the season by a mile, racking up zone time and positive underlying differentials across the board (including a 58.3 percent clip of five-on-five scoring chances) in Tocchet’s seven games.

Perhaps most importantly, the Canucks are actually scoring goals when Miller is on the ice at centre over the past two weeks. In five-on-five minutes Miller has spent away from Horvat and Pettersson, Vancouver has doubled its total of on-ice goals for since Tocchet took over versus what the club managed in their first 48 games.

We’ll see if this run of stellar form keeps up as the sample expands, but through seven games Tocchet’s experiment of utilizing Miller as a somewhat sheltered middle-six centre appears to be working.

Dakota Joshua
Dakota Joshua appears to have earned a bit of trust from Tocchet over the course of his first two weeks behind the Canucks bench.

The 26-year-old forward was one of Vancouver’s least-utilized regular forwards under Boudreau, averaging under 10 minutes per game at five-on-five and rarely — if ever — sniffing the penalty kill through the first 43 games of his Canucks tenure.

Suddenly, with Tocchet in charge, Joshua is playing top-nine minutes on an every-night basis, while featuring in a major way on the penalty kill (and looking disruptive and competent, something that’s rare for a Canucks penalty killer).

Joshua has presumably helped his cause further by producing a pair of goals and four even-strength points since Tocchet took over. Vancouver is also controlling well north of 60 percent of shot attempts with Joshua on the ice in Tocchet’s tenure so far while outshooting its opponents 46 to 29. That sort of territorial control is going to get a player noticed by their coach, particularly when they’re helping to drive it with responsible play on the wall in the defensive zone and assertive forechecking as an F1.

Brock Boeser
Boeser’s had a turbulent season but he’s found serious traction recently. He’s notched eight points in Tocchet’s seven games, which is part of a larger stretch where he’s notched 18 points in 20 contests. Fifteen of those 18 points have been at five-on-five, which ranks him ninth among all NHL players in that span.

Boeser was bumped up to play with Pettersson midway through the Islanders game after scoring in the first period and responded by assisting on all three of the Canucks’ third-period goals to complete the comeback victory. He finally appears to have his grip back on the right-wing spot next to Pettersson which is the spot every winger on the team would dream to have.

The stabilization of Boeser’s two-way game is equally as important as the production uptick. Through the first two months of the season, Boeser had arguably the worst defensive numbers of any player in the NHL — he was driving a putrid 33.3 percent expected goal share and surrendering nearly six goals against per hour when on the ice at five-on-five. He was constantly losing puck battles along the wall, unable to make any impact on the forecheck and had rough moments in defensive zone coverage.

Since Dec. 1, Boeser’s two-way results have improved dramatically, with the Canucks essentially breaking even in shots, scoring chances and goals during his five-on-five shifts. He’s looked engaged and disruptive without the puck and during the last few games, he’s had a bit more jump in his skating.

The Canucks may be able to start selling teams on the idea that Boeser’s ugly first two months were just an aberration after coming back from hand surgery.

Riley Stillman
No Canucks player’s average minutes have spiked under Tocchet more than Riley Stillman’s. Stillman averaged 15:19 under Bruce Boudreau but that has jumped to 17:56 with Tocchet. That included a season-high 20:08 against the Red Wings, where he was third in minutes behind only Tyler Myers and Quinn Hughes. Stillman’s been competent through the increased usage, controlling 54 percent of shot attempts.

Stillman has been the chief beneficiary of Tocchet’s decision to taper Hughes’ minutes. Hughes hasn’t crept over 25 minutes even once with Tocchet, compared to Boudreau, who used Hughes for over 25 minutes in six of his final eight games.

The fascinating observation about Stillman’s deployment is that he’s logged just three defensive zone starts in total at five-on-five since Tocchet took over. For context, the next-lowest mark among Canucks defenders who’ve played in at least half the games is Ethan Bear with 10.

Pumping Stillman’s ice-time numbers while withholding him from defensive zone starts would be a clever way to showcase and inflate his value. It’s way too early to conclude that’s what this is though. It could just as easily be an attempt to boost Stillman’s confidence and unlock the value that management may have seen when they acquired him.

Falling
Andrei Kuzmenko
Andrei Kuzmenko’s minutes have dropped sharply under Tocchet, and he appeared to be an extra at Vancouver’s practice on Sunday.

That implies Kuzmenko could be trending toward being a healthy scratch on Monday when the Canucks host the Detroit Red Wings. We’ll see if that’s how it plays out.

In any event, Kuzmenko appears to have lost his spot as a fixture on Pettersson’s wing for now. What’s particularly interesting is that the drop off in Kuzmenko’s five-on-five usage since the coaching change was immediate, but it’s become particularly dramatic over the past couple of games — or even since Kuzmenko struggled against the New York Rangers last week:

(Courtesy MoneyPuck)

For now, Kuzmenko’s power-play ice time has been consistent since Tocchet took over. It’ll be interesting to see if that lasts, however. Already in key situations in recent games, Boeser has flipped into Kuzmenko’s spot on Vancouver’s first power-play unit. Will that trend continue?

We’re really only looking at a two-or-three game sample in which Tocchet has appeared to be really limiting Kuzmenko’s minutes. So this could be a blip. A tough week. Growing pains in a relationship that proves fruitful over the long haul and helps Kuzmenko develop his two-way game.

The Canucks will have to hope that’s where this story goes considering their recent decision to extend Kuzmenko on a two-year deal that pretty neatly matches the terms of Tocchet’s own contract with the club.

Jack Studnicka
In Tocchet’s very first game behind the Canucks bench, he gave Studnicka an extended look as a top-nine centreman. It didn’t last very long.

The next game, Studnicka was a fourth-line winger again. He finished as the low man among all Canucks skaters in ice time as the club got clobbered in Seattle. He didn’t fare much better in the club’s last game before the All-Star break — a home win against the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Then Studnicka was a healthy scratch. Then he missed a run of games with a non-COVID-19 illness and was sent back home from the club’s recent East Coast swing. It’s not yet clear whether he’ll return to the Canucks lineup on Monday against Detroit just yet, or not.

Studnicka had a tough first week under Tocchet, and then — through no fault of his own — missed the opportunity to make a positive impression. That’s an opportunity that his teammates Vasili Podkolzin, Joshua and Phil Di Giuseppe have seized, which will make getting back into the mix that much tougher.

Luke Schenn
Schenn frankly isn’t anywhere close to Kuzmenko or Studnicka as a “faller” but his new usage is interesting: He’s been the clear No.6 defenceman in average ice time. Schenn used to play nearly two minutes more than Stillman per game, and now Stillman’s averaging about a minute more per game than Schenn. Myers has gotten lit up for goals against at an exorbitantly high rate recently — it’s noteworthy that Schenn, a fellow right-handed defender, hasn’t been asked to pick up some of the slack to ease Myers’ minutes.

The 33-year-old has also spent significantly fewer minutes alongside Hughes. Schenn played around 413 five-on-five minutes with Hughes under Boudreau, which averaged out to roughly 10 minutes together per game. The two have logged only 27 minutes together since Tocchet’s arrival, with Bear getting most of the opportunities next to Hughes. Hughes hasn’t skipped a beat, driving 55.6 percent of shot attempts, 60.4 percent of expected goals and outscoring opponents 9-3 during his five-on-five shifts away from Schenn over the last seven games.

Tocchet’s tabbed Schenn and Oliver Ekman-Larsson as his go-to pair for defensive zone starts so it’s not that the coach doesn’t trust Schenn. But there’s no denying that Schenn’s playing the minutes a No. 6 defenceman would while not getting nearly as many looks with Hughes.

Talking NHL trade deadline strategy with Don Waddell, the moment’s most important GM.

By Sean Gentille

Don Waddell is a busy man.

Now, could you say that of any general manager less than three weeks from the NHL trade deadline? Sure. It’s doubly true for someone in charge of a contender, though, as is the case with Waddell’s Carolina Hurricanes, who are leading the Metropolitan Division and behind only the Bruins in overall points. It’s triply true for someone in charge of a contender with money to spend, as is the case for the Hurricanes and their $10 million in projected cap space.

It’s quadruply true — and if that’s not a word, we’re inventing it — for Waddell, who pulls double duty as Carolina’s president. That gig gives him serious responsibilities over business-side operations like Saturday’s outdoor game, hosted by the Hurricanes at N.C. State’s Carter-Finley Stadium.

So, yeah, Waddell told us on “The Athletic Hockey Show,” he’s looking forward to next week when at least one of those big items will be off his plate. In the meantime, he’s fine with the balancing act.

“You’ve just got to make time for the people you need to reach out to and talk to from a hockey standpoint,” he said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’d rather be busy than pick the other option, that’s for sure.”

Right, but there aren’t a ton of other NHL executives who concern themselves with, like, ticket sales for Hootie and the Blowfish. (They’re playing PNC Arena on Friday, Waddell said. Reunion tour. Sold out. “I Go Blind” still bangs. Timo Meier and Patrick Kane will have to wait.)

In any case, our conversation with Waddell was fun and enlightening, as those tend to be. It was also an exercise in finding a way to indirectly ask the GM of, perhaps, the deadline’s most relevant team about his plans — and what those mean for the rest of the league.

• Waddell was straightforward about Carolina’s involvement in the Bo Horvat trade discussions. Vancouver sent Horvat, the best center on the market, to the Islanders on Jan. 30. He’d been a no-brainer add for the Hurricanes, who are playing Jesperi Kotkaniemi, Jordan Staal and Paul Stastny behind Sebastian Aho. Horvat would’ve given them one of the better 1-2 center punches in the league. Based on the extension he immediately signed with the Islanders, he also wouldn’t have been a rental player, which the Hurricanes avoid more than most.

It didn’t work out, Waddell said, for cut-and-dry reasons: Canucks GM Patrik Allvin was gunning for the highest first-round pick possible, and the Islanders — post-Horvat bump aside — are probably going to finish with a worse record, whether this season or next, when the selection wouldn’t be lottery-protected.

“He was trying to get the highest first-round pick that he possibly could get. He was right upfront about that from the start,” Waddell said. “Our pick’s gonna be, hopefully, someplace in the late 20s or so. Or the 30s. He set out with that as a mission and a goal, and he accomplished it. So I give him credit for that.”

• That bit should probably make Canucks fans feel a little better about Allvin’s priorities moving forward, but it doesn’t do much for the Hurricanes, who recently added $7 million in consolation cap space. That’s Max Pacioretty’s salary this season — money that the Hurricanes moved to long-term injured reserve when he re-tore his Achilles’ tendon in January, five games after returning to the lineup. The plan, both when Carolina acquired him in the summer and when he was originally injured, was for Pacioretty to add playoff experience and 30-goal talent.

“We lost a player that we were counting on for the second half of the year, but more importantly, as a human being, that’s the part that you really feel bad about. You know the effort and time that went into him trying to get back,” Waddell said.

“After the game when I was down there, (the locker room) was as somber as I’ve ever seen it. And I was worried about it. (Rod Brind’Amour) and I talked about (how important) that bounce back’s gonna be.”

The bounce-back has been good. Carolina is 6-1-0 since Pacioretty’s injury, outscoring opponents 29-20 and carrying a 61.0 share of expected goals at five-on-five, second-best in the NHL in that span. Nothing has happened to dissuade Waddell — or Carolina’s ownership — from going “out in the marketplace” even if that means bumping their Pacioretty-inclusive payroll to nearly $90 million overall.

• Players with term, Waddell said, will always be the priority.

“We don’t have a great history of spending a lot of assets on rental players. We want to make sure we are smart about it. We’ve got a good team and we want to add to our team, but we also don’t want to ruin our future for the next few years. So it’s a balancing act,” he said. He mentioned the 2024 offseason, when Aho, leading scorer Martin Necas, Brady Skjei and Brett Pesce could all need new contracts. Those four players make nearly $21 million between them. All, Aho and Necas specifically, are on track for raises.

Of course, the best player on the market is Meier. He’s not a rental, though he’s on track to be an RFA in the summer with a $10 million qualifying offer coming his way if he doesn’t sign a new deal with the Sharks or a new team. His age and skillset — a play-driving monster with 30-goal capability — couldn’t line up better with the Hurricanes’ needs or priorities; they’ve been connected to him for a reason.

Waddell on Monday said longtime former Sharks GM Doug Wilson was one of his favorite trade partners. What about Mike Grier?

“Oh, is Mike the GM there?” Waddell asked. He smiled. “Obviously, I made the (Brent Burns trade) with Mike. I’ve known Mike for a long time. Class guy. He’s gonna do a great job there. And yeah, I’m getting to know him a little better these days.”

And then he smiled again.

• We asked him, straight up, whether he’d be willing to send out his team’s 2023 pick.

“I think so. We have different philosophies in this organization sometimes, but I think right now (the pick is available), particularly if we’re looking at players that do have term — again, the rental thing, I don’t want to say never, because you never know. If something (bad) happens, you might have to adjust your thinking and go a different course. But yeah, I think our first-round pick would be in play this year.”

Our follow-up, basically, was whether he’d move the pick for a rental. This, to be clear, was fishing for intel on Kane, who has yet to decide whether he’ll waive his no-movement clause. The Rangers moved on and, of course, hurt Kane’s feelings in the process. Carolina, according to The Athletic’s Scott Powers and Mark Lazerus, is one of four teams with confirmed interest. And bad as he’s been, it’s tough to imagine a player less than a year removed from a 92-point season going for any package that doesn’t include a first-rounder.

So, is Waddell more willing now to send out a first-rounder for a non-specific, pending UFA if he were the right fit?

“I don’t want to say never,” he said. “I think if you’re looking strictly at rentals as (we get) closer to the deadline, we’re going to exhaust all our efforts on the players that we potentially could pick up. There might be guys that people aren’t thinking about at this time (that emerge) when you’re willing to give up some good assets to get a player with some term left.

“We all know the usual names that are out there, but we may try to look at some other players and entice teams with draft picks and prospects. As we sit here today, we like our team. We don’t want to distract from our team. But we would like to add to our team, if that makes sense.”

• As for the outdoor game against the Capitals, Waddell said, everything is going swimmingly. The game, originally scheduled for late 2021 and then bumped for COVID-related reasons, has been in the works since 2018.

“When (Tom Dundon) first bought the team, it was one of the first things he said: ‘We want to get an outdoor game.’ It was almost a year of work,” Waddell said. “We had to supply a lot of information. And I gotta be honest, the NHL was a little bit worried (with) where we were with our franchise at that point and how we were going to sell 57,000 tickets.”

Now, after a few years of the growth that comes with on-ice success and off-ice effort, the organization is ready.

“I truly think if we’d had another 10 or 15,000 seats, we would have sold them all,” Waddell said. “I still have a list on my desk here of people that are still looking for tickets.”

Ranking the top 10 drafted NHL goalie prospects: Jesper Wallstedt leads Scott Wheeler’s 2023 list.

Scott Wheeler Feb 14, 2023

Welcome to Part 2 of the 2023 edition of my drafted NHL prospect rankings.

Today’s ranking of the league’s top 10 goalie prospects follows yesterday’s top 50 drafted skaters list.

After initially publishing this project as one combined ranking, the switch to two lists was made in 2020 in order to respond to reader demands for evaluations of a wider range of goaltenders reflective of the one-sixth share of the players on the ice that they represent (when skaters and goalies were included in a single list, only a couple of netminders usually made it).

Under my criteria, to be eligible for inclusion, a goalie must:

Be under 25 years old. This age criteria is more reflective of the typical goalie trajectory, allowing for the continued consideration of goalies who are very much still prospects.
Not currently be established as one of their NHL club’s two go-to options. I give myself some arbitrary leeway here. You’ll notice, for example, that 24-year-old goaltender Stuart Skinner, who still qualifies as an NHL rookie, is considered graduated because he has played exclusively with the Oilers this season, while 23-year-old goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, who is currently playing for the Sabres, remained eligible due to a combination of his younger age and time spent in the AHL this season.
1. Jesper Wallstedt, G, 20 (Minnesota Wild — No. 20, 2021)
July 2022 rank: No. 1 (change: none)

It takes a lot for me to rank a goalie at No. 1 on a list, and there’s a reason Wallstedt is the only goalie to top any of this year’s pool rankings.

He’s the clearcut best goalie prospect on the planet for me and his play of late in the AHL — after it took him a couple of months in the fall to find himself at the new level/in the new place — has only reaffirmed that. His game has remarkable polish and maturity. There’s just a control to his game that is so singular and rare in goalies his age. I’ve written about it in the past as almost robotic, and that’s truly the best descriptor for it. Wallstedt’s a big 6-foot-3, 213-pound (he fills the net for his size) goalie who plays sharp lines positionally, holds those lines, and swallows the first shot so that he doesn’t have to make a ton of second saves. He’s incredibly calm in the net, staring down shooters and reading them. He covers the bottom of the net so well and doesn’t seem to get beat along the ice. Few shots sneak through him. His movement is compact, he tracks through layers incredibly well to find pucks, and he reads opposing shooters so well that he’s rarely beat cleanly.

There’s a minor question mark or two around every young goalie in the sport and with Wallstedt I don’t see a single hole or area of weakness that worries me. I’d maybe like to see him develop a little more quickness (he’s strong across the net and low-to-high on pushes, but he sits a little heavy over his skates and I wouldn’t say his feet are fast per se). But otherwise, he’s got all of the makings of a true No. 1 starter.


2. Yaroslav Askarov, G, 20 (Nashville Predators — No. 11, 2020)
July 2022 rank: No. 2 (change: none)

In his first season in North America, Askarov has played well for his age (it feels like he has been on the scene forever but because of his June birthday he just turned 20 last summer) in Milwaukee.

My belief in his tools or his upside as a starting NHL goalie is not deterred, but I have paused at times over the last two seasons in terms of categorizing him in the same light that I do Wild first-round pick Jesper Wallstedt (Wallstedt is the clear top goalie prospect in the game for me at the moment). Askarov’s raw talent certainly makes him unique. His ability to change directions in the net, stay on top of shooters, track their hands, and make reactionary saves is elite. His athleticism is, too. He regularly makes second and third-chance saves holding firm in his positioning even when he’s laying on the ice. But there are tools in his game that still need some refinement.

There are still times when he gets frozen over his glove hand, something NHL teams will exploit. He can still look jittery in the net, bouncing on his toes and moving to pucks (which he says is to keep himself focused and make some of those quick-twitch saves I talked about). But his agility and reads are so impressive that he can steal games when he’s at his best, and make the difficult saves that others just can’t get to or stick with. There isn’t a goalie prospect in the world with quicker feet through shuffles or more explosiveness side-to-side or low-to-high than Askarov. That blend of power and speed combined with his extended early track record gives him a high upside. It will be important to keep in mind his age and not rush him through the AHL despite his pedigree though.

3. Dustin Wolf, G, 21 (Calgary Flames — No. 214, 2019)
July 2022 rank: No. 4 (change: +1)

If you’ve been following my work for any amount of time, you’ll know that Wolf is my favourite goalie prospect in the sport (doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the best, but I love watching him play). When the Flames drafted him at the end of the seventh round, he ranked in the second round of my 2019 draft board, as my second-ranked goalie behind only Spencer Knight. He possesses elite footwork and tracking. He never loses sight of the puck and anticipates the movements of opposing carriers so, so well, making him extremely hard to beat with a deke. You’ll rarely see a player beat him side to side on a breakaway because he can stick on top of them. The results are there. He’s athletic, he’s a superb positional goalie, and his technical ability is refined. Wolf has everything you look for in a top goalie prospect today except for the size. After a bit of a slow start to his second season in the AHL, he has been virtually unbeatable since. There is no reason to believe he won’t be an NHL goalie. I’m confident he’s going to be a really good one, too. His time is coming.

4. Devon Levi, G, 21 (Buffalo Sabres — No. 212, 2020)
July 2022 rank: No. 5 (change: +1)

Levi had a season for the ages at Northeastern last year, posting a .952 save percentage across 32 games and winning both the Mike Richter Award as college hockey’s top goalie and the Tim Taylor Award as its top rookie. His journey from the CCHL to the world juniors and then the Olympics all during the pandemic was one of the best stories in hockey. He has been superb in his return to Northeastern behind a lesser Huskies team as a sophomore this year, too.

He has exactly the skills smaller goalies need to be successful. Impressive control on his outside edges (and the patience to hold them), quick feet on his shuffles so that he can stick with dekes and go post-to-post or low-to-high to get to tough pucks, perfect reads on shooters, excellent tracking through and under traffic, and a battler’s mentality in the net which keeps him in plays even when he looks like he’s down and out on his knees. There aren’t a ton of 6-foot goalies in today’s NHL, at least not starting ones, but Levi, like Calgary’s Dustin Wolf, has all of the tools to become one. I’m a believer.

5. Sebastian Cossa, G, 20 (Detroit Red Wings — No. 15, 2021)
July 2022 rank: No. 3 (change: -2)

Cossa is a huge (6-foot-6), powerful, athletic goalie, and those last two things don’t always come with the first. He’s a fiery, confident, talkative competitor who doesn’t like to get beat (which contrasts with the stoic demeanor we see in many goalies) and wants to command the net and the room. Bigger goalies often struggle with their movements and their recoveries, but neither is an issue for Cossa. His positioning (he does a really good job holding his outside edges to be patient on shots) and reflexes (he’s got great hands up high) help him block and grab a lot of pucks. But it’s his ability to bounce back into his stance or change directions with passes that separates him. His power through his pushes gives him rare side-to-side ability for a goalie that big.

But there are also some question marks. Some of them are contextual, like how good the Oil Kings were in front of him for three years, and some of the leaks his game has displayed while playing behind teams with less structure in front of him (including in Hockey Canada camps and now this year in the ECHL, a league that’s notoriously hard on goalies). But other questions are about the tools, including some of the trouble he faces closing his five-hole because of his size (this is a major recurring issue, even though he does a really good job kicking pucks aimed for the lower corners) and the way he can occasionally lose himself in his net on scramble plays (those strong pushes to get to tough lateral saves can pull him off his lines). He can get pulled out of his net overcommitting on dekes, too.

His natural gifts give him undeniable upside, though. When he’s set and square to shots (as he almost always is), he’s tough to beat. I’ve seen him look unflappable and make point-blank save after point-blank save when he’s dialed in. I’ve also seen him look rattled as shots sneak through holes they shouldn’t be finding. I still think he’s got starter upside due to his combination of size, dexterity and rare explosiveness in the net, but he’s got work to do, and patience will be imperative.

6. Lukas Dostal, G, 22 (Anaheim Ducks — No. 85, 2018)
July 2022 rank: No. 6 (change: none)

Dostal’s on a run of four really strong age-adjusted seasons and is owed a full-time NHL job at this point.

He’s an average-sized (maybe smallish) goalie who has turned his 6-foot-2 frame into an asset by adding some strength (he’s now over 190 pounds, which is about 20 pounds of muscle from where he was not long ago) and power to a game that was already built on agility. He’s got pristine technical ability, great hands (especially his glove), and quick feet which help him stick with dekes, track the play through screens, and make recovery saves on scrambles. Plus he holds his lines on his outside edges extremely well, limiting his movements when he needs to, staying compact, and playing his angles head-on. He has also proven, time and time again, that while his game requires movement, he’s in complete control and rarely swims. He’s going to be one of the Ducks’ two goalies long-term. The question now is just which one. He has certainly turned me from cautious a few years ago into a believer.

7. Pyotr Kochetkov, G, 23 (Carolina Hurricanes — No. 36, 2019)
July 2022 rank: Not ranked

When goalies just keep getting results you have to respect them because of the ebbs and flows in performance that most of them face year-to-year. And Kotchetkov now has a body of work that you can’t ignore. After bouncing around levels and clubs for a couple of years in Russia in search of the opportunity those numbers demanded, it has been nice to see him find stability over the last two seasons in North America, establishing himself as the Hurricanes’ No. 3 for now and soon-to-be more than that (with Frederik Andersen and Antti Ranta both on expiring deals and Kochetkov on a new four-year contract, there’s a full-time job coming for him next year and maybe earlier). He used to be a little on the smaller side for a goalie but he grew a couple of inches late in his development to go from 6 feet to 6 feet 3, he’s quick on his feet (and knees), he’s technically sound, and he’s athletic, relying on sharp angles to control the first rebound and his movement to make recovery saves. I like the way he tracks the play, too. My only critique of him for a long time was that he’d let the odd mid-danger shot squeak through his body or occasionally scramble, but he has worked hard to cut down on both of those things. He’s probably not going to become a true No. 1, but I like him to become more than a backup as a bit of a strong 1B.

8. Akira Schmid, G, 22 (New Jersey Devils — No. 136, 2018)
July 2022 rank: Not ranked

Schmid has been a bit of a revelation these last two years, making the almost unheard-of USHL to AHL/NHL jump (a difficult one, to say the least) look relatively easy.

He’s a 6-foot-5 goalie who plays an aggressive, challenging style (though he has learned to pull back on that a little). He’s also a strong puck handler who is comfortable starting the breakout. He can play a little wide in his stance, which can limit his changes of direction and mobility (though I would say he moves well in other ways, including down into his butterfly to shut his five-hole, and on his knees when he has to battle), but he’s also got good control face-up against shooters and plays his lines. When things break down, he can get beat, but he doesn’t let a lot of low-to-mid danger shots through. There’s a lot to like and even continue to untap there.

9. Samuel Ersson, G, 23 (Philadelphia Flyers — No. 143, 2018)
July 2022 rank: Not ranked

Ersson’s statistical profile has always been a little bit of a roller coaster to follow. There was his excellent post-draft season in HockeyAllsvenskan and internationally which established him as one of the top goalies in the 1999 age group. Then he made the jump to the SHL full time at 20 and played a surprising amount on a poor team to mixed results. Then he played to strong results in his second season in the SHL. Then he finally got groin surgery after dealing with a nagging issue and lost almost all of his first season in North America. And now he has returned and played quite well in both the AHL and NHL in what is essentially his rookie campaign over here.

He isn’t a particularly big or powerful goalie but he reads the play well, holds his angles, and then has the agility needed to get to a lot of east-to-west pucks to make difficult saves. He has also worked on his habits so that he can stay more compact and controlled in the net and it has noticeably cut down on how many shots are cleanly beating him. He has moved his No. 2/3 projection to a potential 1B projection with his play this year, I think.

10. Drew Commesso, G, 20 (Chicago Blackhawks — No. 46, 2020)
July 2022 rank: No. 8 (change: -2)

After a .915 freshman year at BU, Commesso climbed back to a .914 sophomore season with the Terriers following a slow start (for him and the team in front of him, which was banged up and not at its best out of the gate), and has done the same again this year as a young (he’s still just 20) junior after he gave up six goals in his second start of the year and has played well ever since.

I see a mature makeup as a kid and goalie. At 6-foot-2, he’s not big by today’s standards for a goalie, but he blends a studious approach to the position with sharp angles, sound technique, and a calming, poised demeanour to keep shots in his chest, control rebounds, settle down plays and hold firm to his edges. And while he’s not a dynamic athlete, he can fall back on his athleticism when the play does break down, he’s efficient in his movements, he’s quick on his feet and he doesn’t put himself into many scrambles because of the way he reads the play. Commesso reliably makes the saves that he should and plays the same game-to-game. He doesn’t steal a ton of starts and I wouldn’t say he’s got any A-plus tools that really pop, but there’s not a lot in his game that you can nitpick either. I’m not convinced he’s going to be a starter at the next level, but I — and the rest of the hockey world (including USA Hockey, who’ve already brought him to men’s worlds and the Olympics) — fully expect him to become an NHL goalie.

The Tiers
All told, 30 goalies were strongly considered for this year’s ranking, with the 20 who missed the cut featured below as honorable mentions.

As always, the ranking is broken down into tiers below to give you a better sense of where the divisions are between one group and the next. This year’s ranking is divided into four tiers. They are: 1, 2-3, 4-5 and 6+. Consider that third tier as a group that runs from 6-30 (though there’s probably one more divide in there between the goalies I seriously considered and the ones that only got passing consideration).

1
Jesper Wallstedt
20
2021
Wild
2
Yaroslav Askarov
20
2020
Predators
3
Dustin Wolf
21
2019
Flames
4
Devon Levi
21
2020
Sabres
5
Sebastian Cossa
20
2021
Red Wings
6
Lukas Dostal
22
2018
Ducks
7
Pyotr Kochetkov
23
2019
Hurricanes
8
Akira Schmid
22
2018
Devils
9
Samuel Ersson
23
2018
Flyers
10
Drew Commesso
20
2020
Blackhawks
Honorable mentions (sorted alphabetically):

Hugo Alnefelt (Tampa Bay Lightning)
Justus Annunen (Colorado Avalanche)
Joel Blomqvist (Pittsburgh Penguins)
Calle Clang (Anaheim Ducks)
Dylan Garand (New York Rangers)
Mitchell Gibson (Washington Capitals)
Mack Guzda (Florida Panthers)
Dennis Hildeby (Toronto Maple Leafs)
Joel Hofer (St. Louis Blues)
Niklas Kokko (Seattle Kraken)
Carl Lindbom (Vegas Golden Knights)
Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen (Buffalo Sabres)
Erik Portillo (Buffalo Sabres)
Arseni Sergeyev (Calgary Flames)
Arvid Soderblom (Chicago Blackhawks)
Mads Sogaard (Ottawa Senators)
Clay Stevenson (Washington Capitals)
Daniil Tarasov (Columbus Blue Jackets)
Joseph Woll (Toronto Maple Leafs)
Vadim Zherenko (St. Louis Blues)