Friends, the National Hockey League’s Central Scouting Service has released their midterm rankings for the 2020 NHL Draft. As you can imagine, there’s a pretty large Western Hockey League contingent on the rankings.

For handy reference, here’s a quick rundown of how the WHL stacks up at the midway point. Feel free to compare with my personal rankings of available WHLers.

22 WHL players are represented in the top 100 North American skaters. The breakdown is nine blueliners and 13 forwards. 19 of the players are first year eligible players, while three are in their second year of eligibility.

For comparison’s sake, my top five were (in order) Sourdif, Guhle, Schneider, Zary and Jarvis. Sourdif and Zary are already good, while it’s easy to sell yourself on the potential of raw talented players like Guhle and Wiesblatt. If you’re a Flames fan, keep an eye on the likes of Jarvis and Neighbours – they’re the type of smart, toolsy 200-foot players that you can imagine the Flames taking in the first round, particularly given their best prospects right now are small-ish guys like Jakob Pelletier, Dmitry Zavgorodniy, Glenn Gawdin, Matthew Phillips and Emilio Pettersen. They could use a bit of beef, albeit beef with skill.

I’m a bit higher on Prokop than many are, but he’s a tremendously reliable two-way defender who’s been used primarily in a defensive role. With Egor Zamula out for the rest of the season for the Hitmen, Prokop could really improve his standing in the draft class. (He’s a big-bodied right shot defender and potentially the exact type of player the Flames don’t have within their system. It’s easy to imagine the Flames nabbing him with their third or fourth round picks.)

McNaughton has slid a bit since the beginning of the season, as he’s been fairly inconsistent and been challenged by rookie Brayden Peters for the Hitmen net.

The Flames have typically taken at least one player from each of the last few CHL Top Prospects games – Pelletier (2019), Zavgorodniy and Milos Roman (2018), Juuso Valimaki and Adam Ruzicka (2017), Matthew Tkachuk (2016) – so keep an eye out on Thursday night on Sportsnet. WHLers in the event are: