EOTP’s 2025 Consensus NHL Draft Rankings

The 2025 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 seven of the most respected draft rankings and used an average to get our own rankings.

This is our 10th year doing this. Last year out of the 147 ranked players, 135 (91.8%) were drafted. Only three of the top 100 players were not drafted (57th-ranked Tomas Galvas, Daniil Ustenkov (82) and Alexander Zetterberg (84)). The correlation of the consensus ranking to draft selection was 0.7394, an increase from 2023.

Of course, it’s never going to be an exact process. Outlets rank players based on how they feel the players will end up, not where they will be drafted so their goal is not the same as our goal. The goal of the Consensus rankings is to try to get a picture of how the talent is being evaluated.

This year’s rankings uses fewer sources than the last few years. This is not a reflection of the quality of the sources omitted, rather a lack of time to enter all the rankings compared to previous years.

History of EOTP’s Consensus Draft Rankings

Previous Rankings (2016 was not published):
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024

The sources used in 2025:
Bob McKenzie (TSN, ranked 90 plus 10 honourable mentions)
Craig Button (TSN, ranked 80)
HockeyProspect* (ranked 114 skaters)
Corey Pronman (The Athletic, ranked 125)
Scott Wheeler (The Athletic, ranked 100)
Elite Prospects (ranked 137)
Will Scouch/Scouching (ranked 82 skaters)

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.

As an example, Bob McKenzie ranked 90 players with 10 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 113 players. Those not ranked were given 123, and so on. This year, HockeyProspect had a separate list for goalies. Will Scouch did not rank any goalies. Their goalie rankings were not used in the averages and goalies, as a result, were based on five sources.

In 2019, we eliminated the top two and bottom two scores from the average. This improved the results dramatically from other years. We returned to this method for the 2021, 2022, and 2023 rankings but has brought diminishing returns. In 2024, we weighted the average but this year we return to a straight average of the sources used.

In order to be officially ranked, a player needed to be ranked by at least two sources. For goaltenders, if they had one averaged ranking and Hockey Prospect had them ranked, they were included. An honourable mention from Bob McKenzie also counted as a ranking for this purpose.

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, Matthew Schaefer has a range of ‘0’ because he was ranked first by every source. Anton Frondell has a range of ’10’ because his highest rank is 3 and lowest is 13. Note that as you get to the bottom of the rankings, a player’s highest ranking might be the ‘unranked’ number of one of the sources.

Matthew Schaefer is the sixth unanimous #1 in these rankings, joining Auston Matthews, Rasmus Dahlin, Alexis Lafrenière, Connor Bedard, and Macklin Celebrini.

The highest variance in the first 32 prospects is Eric Nilson, with a range of 52. The biggest drop off in the first round is between 30th and 31st, although there is a significant drop off between 13 and 14 as well as 19 and 20. Of note, only five players had at least one ranking in the top-three, down from a record 11 last year. Sixteen players have a ranking in the top-10, down from 18 a year ago.

The “Best” column is pretty self explanatory: it is the player’s best ranking.

Below are the 148 ranked players.

Please note that all names, measurements, and positions are from Elite Prospects near the end of the season.

2025 Draft Rankings

In the case of a tie in the average, the first tie breaker was the player’s best ranking. The second tie-breaker was the higher worst ranking.

The Montreal Canadiens have, for the moment, picks 16, 17, 41, 49, 79, 81, 82, 108, 113, 145, 177, and 209.

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