2027 NHL Draft Prospect Preseason Tiers
In an effort to continue to learn and improve our prospect modeling, we have decided to put together a preseason tier list. Some important considerations and takeaway with these rankings:
Many prospects, especially Europeans, have not yet played at one of the highest levels in their country. By the end of the season, many of these prospects will have accumulated time in top European leagues such as the KHL (and/or VHL), SHL, HockeyAllsvenskan, and Liiga. One notable exception is Jonah Neuenschwander, who spent considerable time in the Swiss National League. Because of that, he has one of the top spots in our model output. As prospects play in more prestigious leagues, and hopefully are strong producers, they will move up significantly.
Each league has it's own fitted model and some of those leagues have one or both of height and/or weight included in the variables that will project success. Given we are modeling 16 year olds, there is a strong likelihood many prospects will grow/add weight. That alone may push some prospects up the rankings.
In the past, we have only released rankings immediately before the draft so there is not a direct comparison that can be made but this class is shaping up to be weaker overall. Landon DuPont is amazing and clearly trending toward being an elite level prospect. After that, Jonah Neuenschwander receives a lot of credit in our model for playing in the Swiss Nation League. Dima Zhilkin is the last prospect that stood out going into this season. Is the reason this class looks weaker due to very few Europeans playing in a top league and having suppressed probabilities or is the fact this class is weaker contributing to players not getting a look in the top leagues? In the past couple years, we have seen plenty of top propsects playing at a high level, particularly in Sweden.
With all of the above in mind, lets take a look at our initial tiers. Tier 1 is sorted in order while the other two are purely alphabetical (by first name) as many have very similar probabilities outputted from our model. Players appearing below were chosen by sourcing the rankings of some of the top public prospect analysts.
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