EOTP’s 2021 Consensus NHL Draft Rankings

The 2021 NHL Entry Draft begins on Friday, and EOTP has been keeping track of most of the rankings to come out ahead of the draft.

Some rankings have more correlation to how the draft will unfold than others, and no rankings are perfect so we combined 15 of the most respected draft rankings and used a modified average of them to get our own rankings.

This is our sixth year doing this. Last year out of the 150 top-ranked players, 132 (88%) were drafted. Only one of the top 100 players was not drafted, 98th-ranked Ethan Cardwell (who is actually ranked again — 125th — this year).

Previous Rankings:
2017
2018
2019
2020

The correlation of the rankings in 2020 (top 217 players) was 0.7365. 81.11% of the 257 players ranked were drafted, including 73.7% of those ranked in the top 217.

The sources used:

Bob McKenzie (TSN, ranked 96)
Craig Button (TSN, ranked 75)
HockeyProspect (ranked 109)
Corey Pronman (The Athletic, ranked 151)
Scott Wheeler (The Athletic, ranked 100)
Future Considerations (ranked 300)
Chris Peters (Hockey Sense, ranked 100)
EliteProspects.com (ranked 107)
Will Scouch (ranked 101)
Smaht Scouting (ranked 135)
The Draft Analyst (ranked 224)
McKeensHockey.com (ranked 223)
The Hockey News (Ryan Kennedy online rankings, ranked 120)
Draft Prospects (ranked 300)
Dobber Prospects (ranked 100)

All of these rankings did not rank the same number of players. And not every player was ranked by each source. This offers a challenge to normalize the rankings.

To make things truly representative, players who were not ranked by a system were given the last ranking of the source+10. This ensured that a player not ranked did not benefit more than a player ranked low. Rankings with 300 players only received a bump of source+5.

As an example, Bob McKenzie ranked 96 players and four honourable mentions. Those not ranked by McKenzie but mentioned as honourable mentions received a rank of 100. Those not mentioned at all received a ranking of 110. HockeyProspect ranked 109 players. Those not ranked were given 119, and so on.

In 2019, we eliminated the top two and bottom two scores from the average. This improved the results dramatically from other years. After eliminating this in 2020, that method is back for 2021.

This is the first year where all sources we used ranked goaltenders in their overall rankings. This means that goaltenders are also based on all sources.

The “Drop” column shows the difference in average between the person immediately above them in the rankings. This is useful to create groups of similarly ranked players.

You will see the averages get close together as you approach the bottom. That is because many of those players were not ranked by several sources, meaning the averages tended to be more equal. This also represents how close players are once you get to a certain point in the Draft.

The “Range” column shows the difference between the player’s highest ranking and their lowest one. As an example, Owen Power has a range of ‘6’ because he was ranked as high as first, and as low as seventh. Power becomes the first player in the six years of this ranking to have a single ranking lower than 2 and be the top-ranked player.

The highest variance in the first 32 prospects is Zachary Bolduc with a range of 53.

(Note that you will need to scroll the table to the right in order to see the Range column).

Below are the 163 ranked players. In order to qualify for the rankings, players needed to be included on at least five of the 15 sources (since we took away the top and bottom two scores, we wanted to make sure players were guaranteed to be using at least one of their own rankings). Please note that all names, teams and positions are from NHL Central Scouting’s final ranking.

The Montreal Canadiens have, for the moment, picks 31, 63, 64, 77, 87, 113, 126, 127, 142, 191, and 223.

For more information on prospects, be sure to check out our prospect profiles here.