The 2020 NHL Draft is almost upon us! As of this writing, the Calgary Flames still have a first round selection. Over the past several weeks, we’ve been digging into the prospects the Flames could select with their opening pick on Tuesday night.

The Flames select 19th overall.

Based on a collection of the eight most prominent rankings – Elite Prospects, FC Hockey, Sportsnet, HockeyProspect, TSN (Bob McKenzie and Craig Button), The Athletic (Corey Pronman) and McKeen’s – 16 players were ranked top 18 on the six lists or more: Alexis Lafreniere, Quinton Byfield, Tim Stutzle, Lucas Raymond, Cole Perfetti, Jamie Drysdale, Marco Rossi, Alexander Holtz, Jake Sanderson, Jack Quinn, Yaroslav Askarov, Dawson Mercer, Anton Lundell, Seth Jarvis, Connor Zary and Dylan Holloway. The Flames likely won’t be able to select any of these players.

Three more players were ranked top 18 in half of the survey rankings: Rodion Amirov, Braden Schneider and Kaiden Guhle. If you’re following along, that means it’s probable that one of this trio is available to the Flames at 19th overall. (Or somebody from the consensus top 16 slides to 19th.) We’ll be looking at Amirov, Schneider and Guhle here since one of them could be the Flames’ pick.

That effectively knocks 16 players off the draft board. Here’s my personal preference ranking of the remaining high-end available prospects:

I’m a big Schneider booster, in that he can touch so many parts off a game in a positive way. The rest of my top group – Perreault, Guhle, Amirov, Bourque and Grans – are high end players with few holes in the game. There’s really no bad players in this mix, but just players I think would suit the Flames’ organizational needs a bit better. Schneider, Grans and Barron, in particular, are right shot defenders who would be tough to pass over.