An expert from The Athletic ranks the pool of CH prospects and the result is surprising

Since January, one of The Athletic's prospect experts, Scott Wheeler, has been releasing a new team each day in his ranking of the NHL's best young pools.

In a descending order, today he featured the team that sits at 11th place, the Montreal Canadiens.

First of all, it must be specified that this ranking does not take into account the players who are regulars in the NHL. Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky, Kaiden Guhle, Arber Xhekaj and Jordan Harris are not included in the depth of the prospect pool.

It's impressive that the Tricolore is ranked 11th in the NHL, just shy of being in the top third, despite all of these players graduating to the National League.


Wheeler mentions that despite the fact that the organization doesn't have any A or A+ prospects left who aren't already with the Habs, they make up for it with a handful of A- prospects and one of the most well-stocked B prospect pools in the league.

However, where the result becomes surprising is in the CH's internal ranking of prospects by the CH.

Here is his list:


As we can see, Wheeler has very high hopes for Lane Hutson and Sean Farrell. In fact, he mentions that he hesitated to put Joshua Roy in the second position, which shows very well that the first five positions could have interchanged.

Huston, Farrell, Beck, Mesar and Roy are the top third of the organization in terms of quality prospects. They should all make an impact in the National League one day.

Logan Mailloux, Justin Barron, Riley Kidney and Adam Engstrom make up the second tier. In his eyes, these are all players who should possibly play a role in the NHL. Surprisingly, he attributes a good difference in the quality of Barron and Mailloux's prospects, versus the top tier.

He finally ranks Jan Mysak, Oliver Kapanen, Vinzenz Rohrer, Cedrick Guindon, Jakub Dobes and Xavier Simoneau in the bottom third, which means that they are prospects with a rather undetermined fate in professional field hockey.

With the upcoming draft, it's exciting to think that the organization will have the chance to add at least two very high quality young players to this already very interesting pool with its two first round picks. There could even be a third if Kent Hughes pulls off another magic trick between now and the trade deadline.

The future is bright in Montreal!