Connor Bedard, Adam Fantilli Top Chris Peters’ Preliminary 2023 NHL Draft Rankings

For the last few years, hockey fans have been hearing that the 2023 NHL Draft will be one for the ages.

Now, that draft is just over seven months away. It will be part of a season-ending celebration in Nashville that will run from June 26 to 29, 2023, and also include the annual NHL Awards.

“Connor Bedard is obviously the crown jewel of the class,” said Chris Peters of FloHockey, who has been covering NHL prospects for more than a decade for outlets like CBS Sports, ESPN and Daily Faceoff. “You have to have the one superstar-potential player that really lifts the rest of the class. In this case, we have one superstar and, I feel like, multiple other stars in this draft. I think maybe the top three could all be big-time stars.”

When Peters released his first ranking of the top 32 prospects for 2023 on November 3, it was no surprise to see Bedard, a skilled center with the Regina Pats of the Western Hockey League, at No. 1. He has been dazzling scouts since the 2021 IIHF World U18 Championship in Texas, where he put up 14 points in seven games as a 15-year-old, tied for the scoring lead on Team Canada and won a gold medal.

The most valuable player in that tournament was another 15-year-old who is also draft eligible in 2023, Russia’s Matvei Michkov. With his sublime nose for the net, he finished with 12 goals and 16 points and earned a silver medal, raising questions about whether he’d challenge Bedard for the No. 1 draft position.

His skillset is still elite, but Michkov is under contract to his Russian team, SKA St. Petersburg of the KHL, until at least the end of the 2025-26 season. With a December birthday, that means he would be nearly 22 before he could even begin his development path with an NHL club.

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine may also make general managers hesitate to use a top draft pick on Michkov. That being said, twenty-five Russian-born players were selected in the 2022 NHL Draft, a similar rate to other recent years. Defenseman Pavel Mintyukov was the highest Russian-born player selected, going to the Anaheim Ducks with the 10th pick, but he is already in North America, playing his second season with the Saginaw Spirit of the Ontario Hockey League this year.

Partly for these reasons, Peters currently ranks Michkov at No. 3. But Adam Fantilli, another Canadian, has also now played his way into the mix. The University of Michigan freshman, who hails from Nobleton, Ont., comes in at No. 2 on Peters’ list.

“He’s been carrying that team offensively,” Peters said. “He’s been scoring at a pace that’s indicative of a special player, producing about two points per game. That has made Michigan more competitive, and it’s starting to look a little more like Jack Eichel’s draft year. He took Boston University all the way to the national championship game and had 71 points as a freshman (in 40 games), the highest-scoring freshman season since Paul Kariya (100 points, Maine, 1993).

“Fantilli’s ahead of that pace at this moment (23 points in 12 games).”

With 12 freshmen in the Wolverines’ lineup this season, it was expected that Michigan would take a step back after seeing six of its seven top-scoring players from last season all move on to the NHL, including Owen Power and Matty Beniers. With Fantilli leading the way, Michigan is off to a 9-3 start despite a tough early-season schedule, and sitting third in the nation in the USA Today / USA Hockey Magazine men’s college hockey poll for the week of Nov. 14.

That top three is indicative of the type of player that dominates Peters’ Top 32: highly skilled forwards.

“It’s a really tough year to be looking for defensemen,” he said. “There are certainly some really good players in the draft. There’s a lot of puck movers, a lot of guys that are kind of on the smaller side that are really good skaters, can move pucks up ice and all those different things. But if you’re looking for those big, rugged defensemen that are going to shut down or can be good at both ends of the ice, it’s just not a year where that’s really plentiful.

“I think that also speaks to the strength of the forward class,” he added. “I think there were only three defensemen who got ‘A’ ratings from Central Scouting. There were two goalies that got ‘A’ ratings, so that’s just crazy. It’s a weird year for that.”

NHL Central Scouting released its preliminary ‘Players to Watch’ list for the 2023 draft on Oct. 25. Players have been divided into three categories, with A-rated players projected to be first-round candidates, B-rated players expected to go in the second or third round and C-rated prospects earmarked for rounds four through six.

Players will get their first numerical rankings from Central Scouting on the mid-term list that will be released in mid-January, then final rankings will come out in May.

Lots can change between now and then, but early rankings like Peters’ are starting to bring the details of a long-anticipated draft class into sharper focus.