Who will be left in the fourth round?

The first round of the 2018 National Hockey League entry draft is over and the Calgary Flames didn’t have a selection. Barring a trade, they won’t select until the fourth round – 105th overall. While there’s potential for them to package their pair of fourth round picks to move up (they have another pick because of trading Jiri Hudler), let’s presume that they won’t get into the third round at all.

So which prospects are going to be left on the table when the draft board rolls onto the fourth round and the Flames are roused from their slumber?

Based on the prominent draft forecasts and rankings, as well as the results of the first round, we can piece together who’ll probably be left. For argument’s sake, we used the top 90 rankings from Future Considerations, ISS Hockey, Hockey Prospect, Bob McKenzie and Canucks Army to effectively create a consensus listing.

In the first round, 29 of the 31 picks were in the top 90 on all five lists. Only two of them – Filip Johansson at 24th overall and Jacob Bernard-Docker at 26th overall – were selected in the first round despite not being ranked in the top 90 on one of the five lists.

So here’s who’s left over from those top 90 consensus lists.

On all five lists [26]: Serron Noel, Akil Thomas, Bode Wilde, Ryan McLeod, Jonatan Berggren, Jared McIsaac, Jacob Olofsson, Mattias Samuelsson, Jonny Tychonick, Calen Addison, Jett Woo, Benoit-Olivier Groulx, Jake Wise, Filip Hallander, Jesse Ylonen, Jack McBain, Adam Ginning, Jakub Lauko, Niklas Nordgren, Jack Drury, Albin Eriksson, Sampo Ranta, Kody Clark, Jon Gruden, Philipp Kurashev and Gabriel Fortier.

On four of five lists [16]: Kirill Marchenko, David Gustafsson, Kevin Bahl, Sean Durzi, Allan McShane, Ivan Morozov, Cameron Hillis, Blake McLaughlin, Blade Jenkins, Oskar Back, Alec Regula, Martin Fehervary, Alexander Khovanov, Riley Sutter, Tyler Madden and Nico Gross.

On three of five lists [12]: Aidan Dudas, Cole Fonstad, Slava Demin, Jakub Skarek, Milos Roman, Ty Emberson, Vladislav Kotkov, Jordan Harris, Curtis Hall, Scott Perunovich, Jachym Kondelik and Dmitry Zavgorodniy.

Between the 31 players already taken and the 54 players listed above with the general scouting community consensus that they’re top 90 players, that’s 85 prospects that will probably be gone by the time the fourth round rolls around. Maybe a couple of them trickle into the early fourth, but not too many.

There’s a wild card in the form of re-entry prospect Adam Mascherin, a Kitchener forward who didn’t sign with the Florida Panthers. He wasn’t ranked by most of the prospect sites because, well, nobody was sure if he’d go back into the draft or sign when they made their rankings. Despite him not being ranked, don’t count on him being available.

The good news is that there are a ton of good prospects that will likely still be available when the Flames pick. Among them, and bear in mind we’re cherry-picking with an eye towards players the Flames have historically liked (from the WHL, OHL and Sweden primarily), are the following players:

Presuming the Flames don’t trade up, they’ll likely get two players from the above list. Most likely they’ll take a forward (possibly one of the WHLers) and a defenseman with their pair of fourth round selections.

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