Welcome to Year 3 of the Sound Of Hockey Big Board. As we did last year, we’re kicking off our NHL Draft coverage midway through the hockey season with a “mid-season” version of the Big Board.

What is the Big Board? It’s a composite ranking of 2025 NHL Draft-eligible prospects based on reputable draft analyst and public scouting service lists—in this case, lists published midway through this season to account for draft-year performance. Put differently, it’s a list designed to provide the current, mid-season “public consensus” on the top players in the draft.

The Big Board does not contain any prospect-specific subjective assessments from us here at Sound Of Hockey. If you’d like a little more information on our methodology, check out our 2024 NHL Draft Big Board post.

We used the following 10 sources to build the mid-season Big Board:

• NHL Central Scouting
• TSN
• Sportnet
• Elite Prospects
• McKeen’s
• The Athletic
• Daily Faceoff
• HockeyProspect.com
• Smaht Scouting
• Upside Hockey

NHL Central Scouting just published its landmark midseason list earlier this week on Tuesday, Jan. 14. Others are not as recent, with some dating back to November or December, 2024. It goes without saying that those earlier lists do not have the advantage of recent gameplay or injury information. Accordingly, this list should be taken as only a rough approximation of a prospect’s current standing. (For example, I suspect Matthew Schaefer might be the No.1 overall prospect if you asked the same group of analysts today, notwithstanding his injury at the World Junior Championship. Indeed, Steven Ellis of Daily Faceoff posted updated rankings mere minutes before this post went live that updated his order to put Schaefer at No. 1.) Season-end lists are much more definitive.

As we progress through the remainder of the draft season, you can expect the same coverage that you’ve come to know from us here at Sound Of Hockey in the past. Want a watchlist of prospects based on our “Data Score” method? We’ve got that for you today too. Scroll to the bottom of this post to find a mid-season “top 200” based on scoring data tabulated through Jan. 12, 2025. I’ll plan to share the full dataset (which is 10,000+ entries long) on the Sound Of Hockey Patreon for the draftniks over there.

Moving forward, we’ll have more scouting and video content here, on the Sound Of Hockey Patreon, and on YouTube. Then we’ll culminate our coverage with the final 2025 NHL Draft Big Board in June, as always.

The 2025 Sound Of Hockey Big Board – mid-season edition

All 396 players ranked by the 10 sources above make up our mid-season Big Board. As you scroll across, you will see the rankings from the various sources we compiled. If the source ranking is behind a paywall, such as Scott Wheeler’s ranking for The Athletic, we have omitted it from the chart. We used those paywalled rankings to develop the composite list, but will not be sharing subscriber-only individual rankings.

Mid-season 2025 NHL Draft “Data Score” watchlist

As mentioned at the top of this article, we’ve also put together a mid-season draft prospect watchlist built on a composite of player data we call “Data Score.” Data score is built from the bedrock of an NHL equivalency (or “NHLe”).

What is NHLe? It is a method to compare the scoring proficiency of players in the various professional and junior leagues across the globe. I used Thibaud Chatel’s model, which is the most up-to-date public research in the area. Check out Chatel’s Substack for an in-depth discussion of NHLe. (For this project, we used Chatel’s newest model, which has been updated to account for player data through the 2023-24 season.)

We then make adjustments for age, height, and position, as well as a modest upward adjustment to the NHLe for low-scoring draft-eligible players playing in high-level professional leagues. These adjustments are based on public research linking these traits to prospect success rates. We’ve gone through the methodology previously here and here. The end product is a number I’ve termed a prospect’s “Data Score.” This number does not “project” NHL scoring but is (hopefully) useful in describing the relative strength of prospects. (For now, this is a skater-only exercise, so you will not see goalies like Joshua Ravensbergen on this list.)

Earlier this fall, we posted a preseason watchlist based on the player’s 2023-24 season scoring data. In contrast, this list is based on scoring data from the 2024-25 season through Jan. 12, 2025, only. My current plan is to incorporate both seasons of scoring data into a final “Data Score” list after the season.

Since I’ve used a minimum 15-games-played threshold for the season-end list, I used eight games as the minimum for inclusion in this mid-season exercise. On the one hand, this likely introduces some small-sample-size issues, but, on the other, it gets projected top pick Roger McQueen (and his eight games played) onto the list.

Without further preamble, here are the 150 first-time eligible draft prospects with the highest Data Score. (If a player has played in multiple leagues, scoring data from each was incorporated into the player’s Data Score, but only the scoring data from the league in which the player has played the most games is shown in the table.)

Nine of the 10 prospects atop this Data Score list were in the top 30 on our preseason watchlist. Five (James Hagens, Porter Martone, Michael Misa, Jake O’Brien, and Roger McQueen) were in the pre-season top 10. Caleb Desnoyers (No. 17 on the preseason list), Benjamin Kindel (No. 18), Carter Bear (No. 22), and Bill Zonnon (No. 28) improved their scoring production a bit. Schaefer is the big riser, jumping up from No. 57 on the preseason watchlist.

Finally, here are the 50 re-draft prospects with the highest Data Score.

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If you have draft- or coverage-related questions, drop us a note below or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @deepseahockey or @sound_hockey or on Bluesky @deepseahockey or @soundofhockey.com.

Header photo by Caroline Anne, courtesy of the Everett Silvertips.