Roughly 15 months ago, the National Hockey League’s Central Scouting Service released its final rankings for the 2025 NHL Draft.

As part of that release, Sioux Falls Stampede winger Ethan Wyttenbach was ranked 185th among eligible North American skaters. Considering that 224 players would be selected overall, that ranking indicated that he was a bit of a long-shot to be selected at all in the 2025 draft.

On the surface, you could sort of understand why Central Scouting had Wyttenbach rated low. In terms of experience, he had just finished his first season in the United States Hockey League after spending his time to that point in prep league hockey on Long Island. With a small sample size of high-end hockey against high-end opponents, a lower ranking was understandable, even if Wyttenbach had been one of the USHL’s better rookies.

In addition to his small sample size, Wyttenbach himself was not a gigantic human being. Central Scouting listed him at 5 feet, 9.75 inches and 180 pounds. While he was committed at the time to Quinnipiac University, a program with a reputation for helping promising junior players turn into good pros – often good NHL players – you could again understand Central Scouting’s hesitance to bestow a high ranking.

In the fifth round of the 2025 NHL Draft, bolstered by recommendations from the club’s USHL area scouts and analytics team, the Flames opted to gamble on Wyttenbach’s potential. Just over a year later, that’s looking like one of the best value picks in the entire 2025 draft class.

In his freshman season with Quinnipiac, Wyttenbach had 25 goals and 59 points in 40 games. Making the jump from the USHL to the NCAA, he ended up increasing his goal and point totals while playing fewer games, and in a year where the NCAA level saw an unprecedented influx of talent due to the relaxing of rules blocking Canadian junior players from playing in college.

Here’s a quick rundown of the accolades bestowed upon Wyttenbach for his year as a true (18-year-old) freshman as he helped Quinnipiac win their first conference regular season title in a decade:

To put this into context: It’s rare for a true freshman to lead a fairly veteran-laden team in scoring. It’s rare for a true freshman to be one of the top players in his conference. It’s rare for a true freshman to be a legitimate contender for the Hobey Baker. It’s rare for a true freshman to lead the NCAA in scoring. And it’s rare for a true freshman to do any of these things while being Wyttenbach’s size, and having the relative lack of high-end hockey experience that he has. (Logan Cooley led the NCAA in 2022-23, whole Will Smith and Macklin Celebrini tied at the top in 2023-24; all three had been considered likely superstars based on their junior performances in their preceding seasons.)

To classify Wyttenbach as an outlier would be an understatement. Based on the performances we’ve seen over the last decade of college hockey, and given where he was selected by the Flames, he’s almost a unicorn.

Way back in 2011, the Flames selected undersized USHL winger Johnny Gaudreau in the fourth round. He went to the NCAA, joining a veteran-laden Boston College team, and excelled. And while it’s way too early to say that Wyttenbach could be nearly as good a pro as the late, great Johnny Hockey, it’s worth noting that Wyttenbach’s freshman offensive output was more than Gaudreau’s – #13 didn’t really hit his scoring stride until his sophomore season with the Eagles.

The point of this ramble is more or less this: Wyttenbach was ranked fairly low in the 2025 draft class because it was challenging to figure out what he was, and to project his future growth, given a small sample size. After one standout season in the NCAA, even the most skeptical onlooker will conclude that he was ranked too low (and that the Flames got tremendous value from him in the fifth round). If he can put together a sophomore year anywhere close to his freshman campaign, the Flames may have something really special on their hands.