2024 NHL Draft aggregated consensus top 32 draft ranking
By Ryan Pike
8 days agoThis article is brought to you by bet365.
When it comes to the 2024 NHL Draft, we’re all-but-certain that Boston University’s Macklin Celebrini will be selected first overall by the San Jose Sharks.
After that? There’s a lot of different ways it could go.
That’s why, for yet another year, we’re using an aggregation of the various public NHL Draft rankings to make sense of it all! We grab a bunch of rankings from various well-informed sources, and then average them out to provide some semblance of consensus… and to help keep track of the draft as it unfolds.
The rankings aggregated
Here’s how these rankings were built: We looked at the top 32 players on 12 different prominent public rankings. We awarded each ranked player points on an inverse scale – 1st got 32 points, 32nd got 1 point – and each player who appeared on one or more rankings had their points aggregated to create our consensus ranking.
Here are the 11 rankings we used in this exercise:
- Elite Prospects
- FC Hockey
- Sportsnet (Jason Bukala)
- Daily Faceoff (Steven Ellis)
- TSN (Bob McKenzie)
- TSN (Craig Button)
- Dobber Prospects
- McKeen’s Hockey
- The Athletic (Scott Wheeler) (paywall)
- The Athletic (Corey Pronman) (paywall)
- The Hockey News (Tony Ferrari)
We like to use the consensus ranking scheme to smooth out any variations in each year’s draft class and provide a general indication of how players are valued across the scouting community. There are a lot of diverse, unique perspectives across the rankings we use, and since they all value slightly different things in their individual rankings, the hope is this produces an aggregated ranking that displays the consensus (or lack thereof) in each year’s draft crop.
Here are the 32 players projected to go in the first round based on this aggregated consensus list.
The consensus first round
| No | Player | Pos. | Nat. | Primary 2023-24 Team |
| 1 | Macklin Celebrini | C | CAN | Boston University (NCAA) |
| 2 | Ivan Demidov | RW | RUS | SKA St. Petersburg (MHL) |
| 3 | Artyom Levshunov | D | BEL | Michigan State University (NCAA) |
| 4 | Zeev Buium | D | USA | Denver University (NCAA) |
| 5 | Cayden Lindstrom | C | CAN | Medicine Hat (WHL) |
| 6 | Zayne Parekh | D | CAN | Saginaw (OHL) |
| 7 | Berkly Catton | C | CAN | Spokane (WHL) |
| 8 | Sam Dickinson | D | CAN | London (OHL) |
| 9 | Tij Iginla | C | CAN | Kelowna (WHL) |
| 10 | Anton Silayev | D | RUS | Torpedo (KHL) |
| 11 | Konsta Helenius | C | FIN | Jukurit (Liiga) |
| 12 | Cole Eiserman | LW | USA | U.S. National Development Program (USHL) |
| 13 | Beckett Sennecke | RW | CAN | Oshawa (OHL) |
| 14 | Carter Yakemchuk | D | CAN | Calgary (WHL) |
| 15 | Michael Brandsegg-Nygard | RW | NOR | Mora (Allsvenskan) |
| 16 | Liam Greentree | RW | CAN | Windsor (OHL) |
| 17 | Trevor Connelly | LW | USA | Tri-City (USHL) |
| 18 | Igor Chernyshov | LW | RUS | Dynamo Moskva (KHL) |
| 19 | Adam Jiricek | D | CZE | Plzen (Czechia) |
| 20 | Michael Hage | C | CAN | Chicago (USHL) |
| 21 | Stian Solberg | D | NOR | Valerenga (Norway) |
| 22 | Sacha Boisvert | C | USA | Muskegon (USHL) |
| 23 | Jett Luchanko | C | CAN | Guelph (OHL) |
| 24 | Teddy Stiga | C | USA | U.S. National Development Team (USHL) |
| 25 | Andrew Basha | LW | CAN | Medicine Hat (WHL) |
| 26 | E.J. Emery | D | USA | U.S. National Development Team (USHL) |
| 27 | Nikita Artamonov | LW | RUS | Torpedo (KHL) |
| 28 | Terik Parascak | RW | CAN | Prince George (WHL) |
| 29 | Emil Hemming | RW | FIN | TPS (Liiga) |
| 30 | Alfons Freij | D | SWE | Vaxjo (J20) |
| 31 | Cole Beaudoin | C | CAN | Barrie (OHL) |
| 32 | Dominik Badinka | D | CZE | Malmo (SHL) |
Positionally, there are zero goalies, 11 defencemen and 21 forwards (10 centres, 11 wingers) – we used whatever position that Central Scouting had listed for each player. In terms of nationalities, there are 14 Canadians, six Americans, four Russians, two Norwegians, two Finns, two Czechs, one Belarusian and one Swede.
In terms of “levels” on the rankings, Levshunov and Buium are clustered closely at third/fourth, as are Lindstrom/Parekh/Catton at fifth/sixth/seventh, Dickinson/Iginla at eighth/ninth and Yakemchuk/Brandsegg-Nygard at 14th/15th. The data suggests that there’s a ledge after 15th, and then another one after 21st.
20 of the 32 players that landed on the consensus top 32 were listed as first-rounders on every ranking that we surveyed. But that also means that there’s a fairly big cluster of players below them that could go in a lot of different directions on draft weekend – some really well-regarded players will be available in the second round as a consequence of this.
Just missed the cut
Aside from the top 32 above, there were another 11 players that were listed as prospective first-round picks on multiple draft rankings. Since multiple lists mentioned them, but not enough to reach the projected consensus first round mix, we’re listing them here in alphabetical order:
- D Harrison Brunicke (Kamloops, WHL)
- D Charlie Elick (Brandon, WHL)
- C Linus Eriksson (Djurgarden, Allsvenskan)
- D Cole Hutson (U.S. National Development Team, USHL)
- D Aron Kiviharju (HIFK, Liiga)
- C Dean Letourneau (St. Andrews College, PHC)
- C Julius Miettinen (Everett, WHL)
- RW Ryder Ritchie (Prince Albert, WHL)
- C Egor Surin (Loko Yaroslavl, MHL)
- LW Marek Vanacker (Brantford, OHL)
- D Leo Sahlin Wallenius (Vaxjo, J20)
In other words, between the top 32 and the 11 honourable mentions, 43 different players were considered first-round quality players on multiple prominent draft rankings. And when you combine these 11 with the 12 players that weren’t unanimous first-rounders, there are about 23 players that could reasonably be taken in the first round or drop into the second round.
The 2024 NHL Draft goes June 28 & 29 in Las Vegas.
Recent articles from Ryan Pike
