Every summer since 2015, we here at FlamesNation have compiled our annual Calgary Flames prospects rankings.

In the dozen instalments of our voting, this was easily the toughest on our voting panel. Depending on how you want to define it, the Flames began their rebuilding process either with the trade of Elias Lindholm to Vancouver in January 2024 or with their trade of MacKenzie Weegar to Utah in March 2026. Whichever way you want to define it, the Flames have been accumulating young talent – via trade, college free agency and the entry draft – for much of Craig Conroy’s tenure.

And the result of that accumulation has been the Flames boasting one of the top prospect groups in the National Hockey League.

And a lot of anxiety on our end when it came to determining who the best of the current prospect group is.

We suspect Conroy and his hockey operations group will continue to make our balloting difficult in the next little while as they keep adding to their impressive young group.

Let’s dig into how we went through this year’s rankings.

We had nine voters involved from our writing and show staff: myself, Mike Gould, Robert Munnich, Adrian Kiss, Paige Humphrey, Ryley Delaney, Flash Stevens, Paige Siewert and Ryan Pinder. Those voters were tasked with sifting through the Flames’ 38 eligible prospect and determining their personal top 20 list. (What constituted a “top prospect” was left deliberately vague and up to each voter’s interpretation, but each player had to be eligible to win the Calder Trophy in 2026-27 to be eligible for selection for this list.)

With each ballot submitted, we assigned 20 points to every prospect ranked No. 1 on each individual ballot and a single point for each No. 20-ranked prospect (and divided up as such for the in-between spots). The individual ballots were aggregated into the overall master list.

10 honourable mention prospects didn’t receive any top 20 votes and were allocated zero points towards their final ranking: Michael Benning, Daniil Chechelev, Simon Katolicky, Aidan Lane, Bode Laylin, Jakob Leander, Jaden Lipinski, Cade Littler, Yan Matveiko and Luke Misa.

Axel Hurtig received one point. Joe Iginla and Rory Kerins both received two points. Trevor Hoskin received four points. Egor Barabanov, William Strömgren and Yegor Yegorov each received eight points. Abram Wiebe received 16 points and finished just outside of the top 20.

Here’s how the top 20 came together:

Five members of the Flames’ 2026 draft class made this year’s top 20: Carson Carels (1st), Jack Hextall (6th), Tobias Trejbal (9th), Chase Harrington (12th) and Alan Shaikhlislamov (16th).

From our 2025 rankings, we saw the graduation of Zayne Parekh (No. 1), Hunter Brzustewicz (No. 3), Matvei Gridin (No. 4) and Yan Kuznetsov (No. 19). Jacob Battaglia (No. 7) was traded to the New York Rangers and Etienne Morin (No. 10) was traded to the New Jersey Devils, while Ilya Solovyov (No. 17) was claimed off waivers by the Colorado Avalanche. Luke Misa (No. 13), Rory Kerins (No. 15) and William Stromgren (No. 16) remain in the system, but didn’t crack the Top 20.

The 2026 top 20 features three goaltenders, four defencemen and 13 forwards. In terms of nationalities, the list contains eight Canadians, four Russians, four Americans, two Czechs, one Slovak and one Swede.

10 of our contributors submitted individual lists for the 2026 rankings. Here’s the breakdown:

Every single voter had Carson Carels in top spot. From there, there was a pretty decent amount of variation – even at the top! Cole Reschny and Ethan Wyttenbach were second, third or fourth for voters. Sam Honzek, coming off an injury-shortened NHL season, was between third and eighth. Cullen Potter, coming off a longer injury-shortened NCAA season, was between third and seventh.

We saw a ton of differences of opinion as we went down the list, especially with players like Andrew Basha (between ninth and 15th), Theo Stockselius (between ninth and 14th) and Alan Shaikhlislamov (between ninth and outside the top 20). It’s a pretty clear testament to just how many interesting prospects are in the system these days; some players that fell outside the top 10 would’ve been there in prior years, and some players that fell outside the top 20 would’ve made it in prior years.

For the record: my pick for our annual “prospect that fell outside our top 20 that made us look silly afterwards” is Simon Katolicky.

As always, your mileage may vary, and we’re excited to hear what you think in the comments.

As individuals and as a group, we watch a ton of hockey around here. But when it comes to many of the Flames’ prospects, we don’t see them as often as some others do. As such, we’re really appreciative of our friends throughout the hockey community who generously shared their insights about several of the Flames’ top young players.

In no particular order, let us gratefully plug the work of:

Considering the sheer volume of college prospects that the Flames have, we suspect that we’ll be checking in with several of these talented writers in the coming months.

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