2025 T25U25: Topi Niemelä is #24

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Topi Niemelä has been a symbol since he was drafted. Just not one that symbolizes the same thing to everyone.

Topi Niemelä	Vitals
Age as of July 1	23.1
Position	RD
Height	6'
Weight (lbs)	181
Shoots	R
Draft Year	2020
Draft Number	64

The stats above are from his final year on the Marlies, per their roster.

Back in 2020 in June while we waited to find out if hockey would ever return, we did a T25 that included the unused draft picks the Leafs owned. The second-rounder came in at #10. At the draft in October, when it finally happened, the Leafs traded that pick, #44, to Ottawa for #59 and #64. Topi Niemelä was taken with the 64th, a third-rounder. A player drafted with a pick in that spot has an approximate 25% chance of ever playing more than 100 NHL games. A career NHLer of note from that pick location is much more rare.

And yet, for reasons that have never been very clear, Topi Niemelä was met with massive optimism and hardcore belief in his future as an NHL defender. In the winter T25, we ranked him 12th in a year when Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander were taking up three spots ahead of him.

I said this in the article posted that December:

Katya: He’s got some buzz, hasn’t he? Is he short? Not really. A zippy winger? Nope. Plays men’s league in the country where it’s easy? Yup. On a top team, where he looks good? Well, they were, I do not know what’s happened to them this year. Did prospects fandom love him? You better believe it. That’s the ingredients for a ranking for a player I’ll get back to you on when I’ve watched him on the same team as Ville Heinola. For now, I’m saying the two Finns drafted in the “Robertson Zone” of the draft have a bigger chance of being something special than the Malgin/Anderson/Engvall continuum. This is me taking a leap on them taking a leap big enough to bridge the gap to the NHL.

So I considered that sort of ranking overly optimistic at the time. Was it? Well, before that question can be answered, another issue needs to be explored.

The Player

At first, everyone thought Niemelä was a defensive defender, good in transition but with no real offensive value. Which is actually a fairly accurate description of Timothy Liljegren, and not at all a good read on Niemelä. Slight they both were, though. And right-shooting. And I think that expectation that Niemelä was somehow going to end up just like the fellow drafted 17th overall who was solidifying a hold on the top pair on a very good AHL team coloured imaginations.

In reality, Niemelä had played a year in the Liiga pre-draft when he likely wasn't all that ready, and added another partial year in 2020-2021 that was full of Covid disruption. His points were poor. The assumption was he had no offence, but the next year, that all changed.

I got to watch him quite a bit in his second full Liiga season, where he had 10 goals and 32 points in 48 games. I say this not in a "do you even watch the games" way, but to point out that I got to see him have the best year of his life, exceed all expectations, and be a lot of fun to watch. The profile of his playing style changed dramatically.

Brigs covered this very well, and that article rings warning bells all over the place that no one seemed to hear. This is the poll at the end of it:

How good do you think Niemelä will be with all these pointzzz?

Top pairing	120
Second pairing	431
Third pairing	139
7th defenseman/AHL first pairing	49
Bust	30

That's a powerful level of assumption that this was a future NHLer we were talking about.

I think for many he symbolized the idea that size doesn't matter, that someone like Liljegren could be an NHL defender on a top pair, so Niemelä could too. I think a lot of his strong detractors were just very wedded to the idea that only big and tough players should be in the NHL. He also symbolized the idea that the Leafs with Kyle Dubas around were just a better and smarter team than anyone else.

But I think there was also a lot of genuinely held belief that transition skill was where the NHL was heading, and big defenders were by their nature slow and not very good. This stew of ideology over individuality persists in the zeitgeist around this player today. You will see opinions that Niemelä is actually NHL-level, but the GM of the Leafs is intentionally pushing him aside because he only wants big defenders.

Back to those warning bells. What Brigs was saying in that article was that as exciting as Niemelä was, as fun as he was, and as unexpectedly good on the power play he turned out to be, he was doing that in a league that doesn't produce NHL defenders very often.

Eventually Niemelä played at the WJC and was right there on the ice with Ville Heinola, and if the bells had been ignored before, they shouldn't have been any longer. In 2022-2023, Niemelä fell down a pairing on his Liiga team, got a lot fewer points, and was falling out of favour with Team Finland as he played on the men's team in two friendlies against easy competition and clearly didn't belong on that team at all.

In 2023 and 2024, he came in at #6 both times in the T25. Last year, by chance, the article about him dropped just as Johnny Gaudreau had been killed, so the idea of talking about players only in terms of their value on the ice didn't really fit the mood. But there is one comment that was worth the entire article.

Yeah to me, it's not so much that he's not that good as a player, but that the type of player he is isn't that good. Even if he becomes really good at the type of defenseman that he is, that's not a very useful type of defenseman.

That type of defender is very useful in the SHL, and I expect Niemelä to be a fun player who is popular with the fans.

There's a view of him that he just never really progressed, but I think if he holds down a serious job in the SHL at 23 when he was only really able to do that in the Liiga when everything went absolutely perfectly and he was being brought along as a prospect... well, that's growth. However, it's growth in terms of who he is and always was. He never was going to become more muscular, tougher in the corners, faster up the ice, but I think he has become more and more able with the puck over the years, quicker and more agile offensively, and not even a little bit good at defending.

He hasn't changed, our understanding of him has. Whatever really drove that early gush of optimism wasn't about him and who he is. He's a Redhawk now, and I hope he kills it.

The Votes

I ranked him (just) because he is an AHLer of some ability. And that's not nothing.

Voter	Vote
Cathy	25
Brigstew	NA
Species	23
Hardev	NA
shinson93	21
Cameron	NA
Zone Entry	23
Svalbard38	25
dhammm	21
adam	17
Weighted Average	23.3
Highest Vote	17
Lowest Vote	25

The Opinions

Brigstew: I don’t have much new to say about Niemelä that I haven’t said the past 2-3 years. He needed to make improvements to his strength and defense, and he flat out has not improved in any noticeable way since he got to the Marlies. He got surpassed by William Villeneuve, and while I’ve always liked Villeneuve (and Niemelä actually) that says a lot to me.

Shinson93: It was difficult to watch Niemela lose his role and playing time to Villeneuve last year. I still like Niemela’s skills, especially his puck movement and gap control. But, he didn’t seem to have the fight in him to take back his spot. I wonder if he maybe checked out on the team even before the season ended. I hope he can find his game back in Europe.

Svalbard38: In the right situation, I still think Topi could be an NHLer one day. He’s got good hands and even though he’s not a top offensive talent, he’s got the underlying skillset. I don’t see it happening in Toronto anymore though. Our D corps is pretty set for the next couple of seasons, barring any kind of big move, and he doesn’t really fit the mold of what a Brad Treliving defenseman should be. He could come back over to North America one day, but realistically most European players who try it and go home don’t come back to their drafting team.

Species: I knew what was going to happen the moment I saw SHL and Liiga scouts on the check-in list at multiple Marlies games in early 2025. They were like buzzards circling over the team, waiting to pick up what they already knew they could get. At the final game of the season, Logan Shaw mentioned “I know there are players here who won’t be back next season,” meaning he had already been told by some players they had arrangements in motion to leave the team. The question was who.

While Euro scouts are sometimes looking for late-career AHL players who want a Nordic hockey experience, Niemelä or Hirvonen were the obvious targets, and it turns out they took both, and I’m not surprised. I saw little development to Niemelä’s game happening in the AHL, and as noted by Shinson above, there was little hustle to his play as the team slid down the division rankings after January and then blew-up in the play-in series. He already knew he was walking out the door and played like it. I don’t know if he will come back, but for right now, this coming season, the Leafs did not lose much potential here. Hirvonen on the other hand I think is a loss, and I don’t understand how Niemelä got on this list and he didn’t.

dhammm: NHLe models were always sour on Topi Niemelä but I wanted to believe, mostly because of how enchanted I was with those scrappy COVID WoJu Finland teams and how much I wanted the Leafs to have done something smart that yielded results by trading back and drafting him. But his size was a concern, as a 6’0” defenseman who needed to put on muscle and whose skill wasn’t overwhelming enough to mitigate those concerns. Niemelä’s return overseas bodes poorly for his NHL chances, obviously, but unlike some other prospects who went back, Niemelä’s profile is not conducive to him getting even depth minutes in the NHL for the Leafs or any other team right now. Size is back in for defensemen outside the elite; not even Erik Brännström could keep a job in North America. For Niemelä to get an opportunity as marginal as the 8th defenseman spot on some depth chart and to prove he belongs in the NHL the current size trend among defensemen will need to change.

Hardev: Didn’t give him a second thought. I think he fell out of the AHL, not poised to get called up. And it’s not the Leafs fault that happened. The only way I can understand what other people see is by reminding myself of Jeremy Bracco.

Niemelä is only 23, and the Leafs retain his rights, so he'll be in the T25 next year. But I think we've mostly had the reality check on who he actually is. He has too, it seems. Go Redhawks.

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