Who will be left for the Calgary Flames to select at ninth overall?

If you’ve followed the online discourse surrounding the Calgary Flames’ ninth overall selection in the upcoming 2024 NHL Draft, it’s gone a little something like this:

“The Flames should draft (Player Name) at ninth overall, he’d be awesome.”
“You fool! There’s no way that (Player Name) will still be available at ninth overall!”

Now, it’s pretty obvious that only eight players will be gone by the time the Flames step up to the podium for the first time in Las Vegas. But which eight players are the most likely to be selected before the Flames draft?

Let’s find out!

So here’s what we did for our thought experiment: this is the type of draft where there’s a lot of difference in opinion in the first round. That’s not to say that NHL clubs think it’s a bad first round, but they all value different things so there’s a lot of variation in the first round.

In order to illustrate that – and model roughly how weird the opening round could be – we mapped out the top eight players on 10 recent public rankings.

The rankings were used were:

We tallied up where each player showed up on each ranking and built this handy table. After the top two, there’s a gigantic amount of variation in these 10 rankings.

In terms of how likely each player is to be gone before the Flames select at ninth overall – based on the 10 rankings we examined – here’s a quick rundown:

This isn’t meant to be a prediction, but instead we’re meaning it to be illustrative of how weird the first round could be. We’re pretty confident that Celebrini, Demidov, Levshunov, Buium and Parekh will be selected before the Flames pick. And the odds suggest it’s pretty likely that at least one and perhaps two of Dickinson, Catton and Lindstrom will be picked before ninth overall.

But we wouldn’t rule out somebody in the top eight having a different draft list than the 10 public rankings and going a bit against the rankings consensus. Heck, given the vibe that the 2024 draft class has had, we’d almost expect a surprise or two early on. The NHL Draft is always a fun two days, and the chaos and surprises are a big part of the fun.

All in all, though, we’re pretty sure that a really well-regarded prospect will be available for selection by the Flames at ninth overall. In fact, probably quite a few of them.