2026 Top T5 Under 25: Bonus content Brendan Brisson

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The Maple Leafs signed 24-year-old Brendan Brisson on Friday, so we dropped everything and got to work adding him to the T25 (despite some grumbling).

Brendan Brisson	Vitals
Age as of July 1	24.7
Position	C/W
Height	6'
Weight (lbs)	188
Shoots	L
Draft Year	2020
Draft Number	29

Brisson would have been the oldest player on the T25 eligibility list, knocking Artur Akhtyamov down to second-oldest. He has 27 games played in the NHL, with 15 coming in his first season in Vegas in 2023-2024.

The Player

It's hard not to look at Brisson's past and not consider that if he hadn't been taken in the first round, albeit just barely, he would not be getting all these tryouts on NHL teams. Touted as a big thinker offensively as a prospect, that has failed to appear in measurable ways since.

His AHL play has been good from an offensive point-of-view, and he was second on the Wolfpack last year by points without playing the full season there. But so far he has been unable to crack the NHL on two very different teams: the Rangers, who were very bad last year; and Vegas, who don't have openings in their depth too often.

Nominally listed as a centre, I believe he plays wing more often.

The Votes

Not everyone dropped everything on a holiday weekend to vote so no official retabulation took place. But he would have landed somewhere in the 15 range, possibly a little lower.

Voter	Vote
Cathy	10
Hound Line	23
Shinson93	20
Sclodiggity	11
Brian S	19
Svalbard38	16
Hardev	11

While the votes are spread out, the reasoning for those votes is all pretty similar. What is interesting is that no one mentions Artur Akhtyamov in their discussion of Brisson. They are closest in age, and have decently analogous NHL experience – some, but not much. The more obvious comparator is Jacob Quillan who wasn't very good in his longer NHL stint. Others are William Villeneuve and Ryan Tverberg. How you intermingle these guys in with very young prospects is one of the hardest things about the T25 and is one of the ways it makes you consider prospects in a larger context rather than merely ranking them against each other.

I would rank him above Quillan who I had at tenth. I had Emil Andrae at ninth, and I think I would sandwich him in between just because Andrae has a history of some legitimate NHL success.

Brisson has never lived up to his draft-year profiles in terms of his offensive abilities. If that hockey IQ and offensive talent is not real or not workable in the NHL, then he's just a very good AHL player. It's also hard not to imagine his draft position was influenced by his very famous and powerful father.

This is confounded by the fact he was drafted by Vegas – a team that isn't in the draft and develop business and has a roster that's hard to crack. Going from there to the Rangers – who seem to be always signing players they don't like and don't use – and getting only three games makes it fairly difficult to really know what his true abilities are.

So far, he hasn't made anyone put him on their roster.

The Opinions

The best part of this exercise (for me) was all the grumbling and complaining, and then Brigstew just bakes us all a ten-layer cake with four kinds of icing as a comment. He can't do a bad job at this.

Hardev: I also had Quillan at 10th, but I’m putting Brisson just below him because I think Quillan has been out-scoring Brisson in the AHL for the last two years. Brisson has played more NHL games, yes, but I’m inclined to believe that’s because he was drafted in the first round. Quillan was undrafted, and by the time he was signed out of college, Brisson had already played 15 NHL games.

This position actually makes me question again why I ranked Andrae where I did (no spoilers). Fun fact, Brisson was on the Chicago Steel (yup, those guys) with Gunnarwolfe Fontaine. Of the big name players from that roster, Owen Power, Josh Doan, and Mackie Samoskevich are the NHLers, while Brisson and the two Anaheim Ducks picks Sean Farrell and Sam Colangelo are AHLers.

Sclodiggity: I’m putting Brisson at 11, right behind Bilecki, who I feel like has a decent shot at a strong NHL career and has a very reasonable chance at playing 100+ games. Would Brisson be a regular roster player on a bottom team? Well, no. He played for the Rangers last year and got into 3 games. Further, turning 25 in about a month, he doesn’t exactly have runway to grow. His draft hype and strong NCAA play is quite far in the rearview mirror by now. And yet, I can’t shake the bias that he’s better than the undrafted Quillan (23 games last year who I ranked at 17). These are likely equivalent players as medium quality callups, but I take Bo Groulx over both of them. Brendan gets the edge due to the link to his dad, one of the most important player agents, Pat Brisson, who’s client list include John Tavares and (dun dun dun…) Gavin McKenna!

Brigstew: I considered saying I wouldn’t rank him anyways, just to protest having to do more rankings. Unlike every other player except for Emil Andrae, I haven’t personally watched Brisson at all. All I know of him is what I can see on his EP page and what I can read from people who have watched him. So I can see he hasn’t carved out a fulltime role in the NHL yet despite being 24, and worryingly one scout I follow referred to him as “discount Nick Robertson, a shooter without much else.”

After looking into him, it’s interesting seeing him as one of the leading producers for some very good and very deep (in NHL drafted prospects) teams like the Chicago Steel and Michigan Wolverines. On the other hand, his offensive production hasn’t looked as good, albeit he was among the top producers on bad teams.

From more recent scouting reports, the whole “shooter without much else” line kind of stands up. He’s referred to as a powerplay specialist with good offensive skill, vision, and a really good shot. But he struggles with the higher pace of the NHL, doesn’t have much of an impact at 5v5 even offensively, he’s an average sized player who doesn’t play very physical, and in fact he doesn’t play any kind of style that would endear him to coaches for someone who doesn’t produce.

So for ranking him in the T25U25, in the end I’m seeing a valuable AHL offensive guy who will probably replace what Alex Nylander brought to the Marlies the past few years. In that sense, my ranking of him would start somewhere around Quillan and Haymes. But I’m not going to lie, guys who struggle with pace or having any impact outside of scoring on the powerplay is not the kind of player I typically like. Without having seen himself at all, going just off these scouting reports from people I generally trust, I’d have him below those other older AHL-NHL tweeners but in the same tier. As a result, 19 is probably where I would rank him. That’s a bit ahead of Villeneuve, Hopkins and Williams, but behind Gudmundsson, Fellinger, and Pepoy… with Quillan and Haymes at 14 and 15 for me. I am open to thinking better of him once I see him myself in full games being able to contribute in other ways.

Svalbard38: Like others, Quillan was the comparable I immediately went to when trying to rank Brisson. I was lower on Quillan than the rest of the panel, ranking him 18th on the basis that he’d hit the age where a skater is perilously close to being in “is what he is” territory, and I didn’t see him getting into many games with the Leafs over the next season or two. Brisson fits into a similar category. He’s very nearly 25, he’s played a handful of NHL games, and he’s arrived in an organization that doesn’t have much of a place for him. I see him in the same way I see Quillan, an AHLer unlikely to dress for the Leafs unless there’s multiple injuries further up the depth chart. The main factor that puts Brisson over Quillan for me is that he’s a player that this front office chose rather than one they inherited. That might give him the edge when it’s time to pick who to call up.

Shinson93: Without the time to really investigate and understand this prospect, I looked at 2 quick factors to try and place him in the position of NHL/AHL tweeners that he appears to be. First, I looked at his contract compared with the others (not on ELC) as a measure of how the Leafs see him. Quillan and Tverberg also just signed 1 year $850K two way contracts. Quillan getting a $350k minors salary, Brisson getting $300k, and Tverberg getting $250. Then I also looked at Henrik Rybinski (who most people already forgot), who got a much better 2 year contract with better minor salary ($400 and 900K) as a pure AHL guy. This confirms that he’s not the lowest, but is maybe somewhere between Quillan and Tverberg.

Next, I look at stats and notice that his scoring has been decent but his +/- has been very bad, but this is typical on AHL teams that were also quite bad. When I looked deeper, I found he was the worst guy on both teams (he was almost double the next worst guy on Hartford last year). From this, I don’t have much expectations that he can break back through as a trusted NHL player and had to put him toward the bottom of guys that I think need a big jump to even get an opportunity, especially at his age. Steve Sullivan has a big project to try and turn this guy into something more than he appears to be.

Hound Line: Do we have to rank him? He’s Haymes without any of the secondary skills that could make him playable as a 4th liner… 23rd.

In the end Brisson has solidified something about this T25: there is a very large middle tier of players and prospects that everyone considers largely identical in value.

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