Folks, our annual month-long countdown of the Calgary Flames’ top prospects has been completed. Zayne Parekh reigns supreme as the top prospect in the Flames’ system.

Now, let’s get into how we got to our list. Let’s dive into the nuts and bolts of the individual lists, the aggregated overall list, and how things changed from a year ago.

Our 10 voters were tasked with sifting through Calgary’s 36 eligible prospects and crafting a list of who they deemed the top 20. (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 2024-25 to be eligible for selection for this list.)

With each ballot submitted, FlamesNation managing editor Ryan Pike 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).

10 prospects received no votes and, correspondingly, earned zero points towards their final ranking: Jonathan Aspirot, Daniil Chechelev, Lucas Ciona, Trevor Hoskin, Waltteri Ignatjew, Eric Jamieson, Joni Jurmo, Hunter Laing, Cade Littler and Ilya Nikolaev.

Arsenii Sergeev received one point, Parker Bell received six points, Yegor Yegorov received seven points, Axel Hurtig received eight points, Sam Morton received 15 points and Rory Kerins received 16 points.

Here’s how the top 20 came together:

Nine new players feature on the 2024 prospect rankings that weren’t in the organization 12 months ago. Seven of them (Parekh, Basha, Gridin, Mews, Battaglia, Misa and Zarubin) were 2024 NHL Draft selections, while Brzustewicz (from Vancouver) and Grushnikov (from Dallas) were added via trades. If you factor in all the acquisitions stemming from Craig Conroy’s trades this past year, six of the top 20 (Gridin, Battaglia, Zarubin, Misa, Brzustewicz and Grushnikov) are assets directly linked to the retooling moves.

From the 2023 list, we saw the graduations of Matt Coronato (No. 2), Jakob Pelletier (No. 3), Connor Zary (No. 7) and Martin Pospisil (Not Rated), as they all exceeded the NHL games played cap to be considered NHL rookies for 2024-25. Topi Ronni (No. 10), Ben Jones (No. 12) and Emilio Pettersen (No. 20) all left the Flames organization over the past year. Lucas Ciona (No. 11), Rory Kerins (No. 14) and Arsenii Sergeev (No. 15) all remain in the Flames system, but failed to garner enough votes to reach this year’s top 20.

The 2024 top 20 features two goaltenders, eight defencemen and 10 forwards. In terms of geography, the list contains eight Canadians, five Russians, three Americans, one Slovak, one Belarusian, one Czech and one Swede.

10 of our contributors submitted individual lists for the 2024 rankings. Here’s the breakdown:

There was complete consensus on the top two, with everybody voting Parekh at first and Wolf at second. Beyond that? Chaos! Glorious, glorious chaos! We’ll get into the nuts and bolts of the challenges our voters faced in an impending roundtable later this week, but there was a ton of variation after the top two on basically everybody’s ballots.

Samuel Honzek? He ranged from third to seventh. Andrew Basha? Between third and ninth. Matvei Gridin? Between fourth and seventh. Jeremie Poirier? Between fourth and 10th. Tons of variation, a reflection of a prospect base that has a ton of more depth and variation in it than it did 12 months ago.