While it's not even a given that Gavin McKenna and Ivar Stenberg will be 1-2 or 2-1 in the draft this June, even sticking to the most conservative rankers, the list after that is chaos. Chaos that is going to change before the end of June. Chase Reid may already have bounced Stenberg. And the bias to centres will work its magic on the rankings too. None of which really tells you what individual teams think.

I was going to cover the two defencemen I thought were mostly getting ranked just behind McKenna, but there's too many names. So briefer notes on the field will do.

This is, once again, not a scouting report, but just a brief look at who everyone thinks these people are.

Viggo Björck

Björck, born in March, is only just 18. He is from Stockholm and has played his entire career there to date. He is a right-shooting centre. He moved from his home club in 2024 at age 16 to go to Djurgården when he played mostly at the J20 level. He got in a couple of playoff rounds too. Djurgården were in Allsvenskan at the time, something they don't tend to take lightly, but Björck only played one game there.

Last season Djurgården was back in the SHL and so Björck joined them there. He played 15 minutes per game, had very little power play time and almost no PK time. His on-ice Corsi was poor, and his points are a lot less exciting than Stenberg's. Their seasons are not very comparable, but the role of prospect evaluation is not to just look at where they are now, but where they will get to.

Björck had a lot of early buzz before Stenberg's strong showing this past season, and in older rankings he's often higher. His story is one where his early hype was based on reading way to much into some junior points totals and his subsequent re-evaluation might be an overcorrection based on size.

Carson Carels

Carels will have just turned 18 by draft day, and he is from Cypress River, a small town nearish to Winnipeg. He grew up on a farm there, and he is a left-shooting defender. He started playing for a prep academy, as McKenna did, but a year later in 2021-2022. Pilot Mound Prep is not far from home, and his uncle Dan Carels has been the assistant coach there since Carson's first year.

Carels was drafted by Prince George in the first round of the WHL draft and has two full seasons there. They've been a good team but not a great one. He's had some playoff experience to go with Team Canada play at U17, U18 and last year's WJC.

He's getting the same hard-working farm boy narrative we all know and love about Easton Cowan, but other than that, he seems to be not Verhoeff or Reid. He started out on the second pair at the WJC and dropped very fast to the extra defender and sometimes scratch. But by the bronze medal game he was back on pair two again.

He is a symbol of this part of the draft. He's good, not great and any difference between him and other defenders is a question of scouting and how they are projected to develop. Along with all the size bias and other things people mistakenly rate too highly.

Tynan Lawrence

Lawrence, who has an August birthdate making him one of the youngest players in the draft, is a left shooting centre. He is from Fredericton and played some U15 hockey there before making the big move to Shattuck St. Mary's in 2022. He was just 14 at the start of the season and played in his age group for the U14 team. He moved to the U16 team the next year and then to the USHL in 2024-2025, playing for Muskegon. He led that team in points, but not dramatically so.

Last year he played 13 USHL games before joining Boston University where he only played 18 games. He had some injuries to recover from and the story on the switch to BU is one about him trying to raise his profile ahead of the draft. He played in the U18 for Canada, not the WJC, not least because of his injury timing.

He's always been one of the younger guys on his team, and you can say he's almost a full season behind McKenna in terms of experience. His story is one of being overlooked because of a lack of stats in his draft year but also getting overrated due to the time-honoured bias to centres on draft day. He's more of a puzzle to solve than a known commodity.

Caleb Malhotra

Malhotra is also a centre, and will just be 18 on draft day by a few weeks. He is from Toronto, and father Manny Malhotra was playing with the Blue Jackets when he was born. His uncle is the basketball player Steve Nash, so he gets the athletic family storyline by default.

This sort of fame by association and gross misunderstanding of genetics usually dramatically obscures a players individuality and their real value. The son of an NHLer almost always gets a higher pick than he might seem to warrant. That doesn't mean he isn't very good, though.

Malhotra played his hockey in Vaughan up to the 2024-2025 season where he moved to the BCHL. This was a tactic to maintain NCAA eligibility, something no longer necessary. He may well have played in the OHL for a year if the rule change had come earlier. Instead he went to the Brantford Bulldogs this past year while he is committed to Boston University for next season. The Bulldogs lost in some heartbreaking games and were beat out of the playoffs by a very hot goalie run. but they were a stacked team. He had a mass of points and he ranks 19th in the OHL for points per game, irrespective of age. For his age group, he's third.

His story is his famous family, his points and the fact that everyone expects Vancouver to draft him. Somewhere underneath that is a hockey player who is unique in his own way.

Chase Reid

Don't get this Reid mixed up with the unrelated Cameron Reid who played on the first pair for Canada at the WJC.

Reid is another old man in this draft with a late December birthdate. He is a right shooting defender which alone gooses his value up some. He is from Chesterfield, Michigan and played his youth hockey in the hot-house atmosphere of Michigan's Tier 1 Elite teams.

When he was 16, he played a very few games in the USHL, then he dropped to the NAHL, a Tier II junior league, the next year. His USHL team wasn't playing him, but he was aiming for the NCAA so he needed to maintain eligibility. He had been drafted by the Soo Greyhounds of the OHL (still decently close to home) and he chose to make the switch when the rules changed. Suddenly he had all these points. Assists were dropping from the sky! Brady Martin, last year's fifth overall might have had something to do with that. He repeated the trick with Martin gone, but, let me digress...

The Soo has this guy named Marco Mignosa from Toronto. He's almost short enough to be a classic zippy little winger, and he scores in the OHL like it's easy. He's switching to Penn State next year, part of this wave of players swapping leagues. He was drafted in the seventh round by Tampa. You watch, he'll be their fourth line sparkplug in a few years. His scouting report is about everything but all that sparkly scoring. Guys like him are how guys like Reid get all those points.

Reid, who is planning to go to Michigan State next season, played in the WJC where he lined up on the second pair and was fine, but many scouts just love him and think his play there was outstanding. His story is his struggle in both the USHL and the NAHL and his explosion of points when he moved to a team stacked with good forwards. He used to have the same kind of stat line when he was 16/17 as well before his lull. And now, today as we approach the draft, he's all about the huge bump in hype, rankings and attention paid. What will determine if he's a good draft prospect is what exists behind both the coveted right shot and that synergy with someone else's offensive skill.

I want to confess to being deeply skeptical of Reid and the foundation for the hype. When people talk about him, they glide effortlessly over his defending and talk about his puck moving in terms of offensive support. Which is, for me, the way you talk about assists without saying the word. I think defending at a high level is the must have, and it is not offset by puck skills.

Keaton Verhoeff

Verhoeff is from Fort Saskatchewan, which is in Alberta, as you'd expect. He is a right-shooting defender, and he has a June birthdate, so will shortly turn 18. He played in his local youth leagues and then moved on to Rink HA Kelowna in 2022 when he was 14. If that name sounds familiar, it is where Gavin McKenna played, but Verhoeff arrived after McKenna left.

Drafted by the Victoria Royals of the WHL, Verhoeff played a few games at 16 and then a full season at 17 including some playoffs. Last season he moved to the NCAA with the University of North Dakota.

He has played for Team Canada at the U17 and U18 level and at the WJC last year where he was usually on the fourth pair (the IIHF allows more skaters) and often played with Carson Carels. For all of that he has risen in a lot draft rankings over Carels.

Verhoeff only switched from goaltending to defence at age 12, so his trajectory to top prospect has been unusual.

His story, I'm inclined to think, is one of size in a field of smaller players. Not much smaller, mind you, but 6'4" is enough outside the average player to be notable. A lot of public "Not-McKenna" opinion seems to have coalesced around Verhoeff as a total opposite – big, strong, defender, with a lot of sparkly offence that dazzles.

As we move closer to the draft, Verhoeff is giving way to Reid.

That's the bulk of the field, but there are more players people will place in their top five. I don't believe anyone is a consensus pick over McKenna, and ranking anyone over him is still a radical idea. But that tall poppy is going to take more and more hits as the weeks unfold and more and more opinions will look for someone not the obvious.

NHL Draft