As of Thursday, Sept. 11, the Seattle Kraken are officially back on the ice preparing for the 2025-26 season. As always, on-ice activities begin with a Rookie Camp for players not yet established at the NHL level. This year’s group includes includes all Kraken prospects except those scheduled to play college hockey or overseas.

With this activity ramping up, there’s no better time to debut our Sound Of Hockey Seattle Kraken prospect ranking. Without discussing in advance, John Barr and I provided our own personal preseason prospect rankings, and then we combined them to create our Sound Of Hockey rank. At the end of this post, we’ll debate how our rankings turned out, as well as a couple bigger-picture topics.

Today—as we do annually at this time of year—we’ll also pass along a composite ranking of Seattle Kraken prospects from public scouting and draft analyst rankings, which we have dubbed the “Deep Sea Blue Chips.” This year we gathered player and system rankings from:

• McKeen’s Hockey (link) ($)
• Elite Prospects (link) ($)
• Steven Ellis, Daily Faceoff (link)
• Corey Pronman, The Athletic (link) ($)

Let’s start with these analyst rankings and provide some takeaways, then we’ll dive into our Sound Of Hockey Seattle Kraken prospect ranking and a debate between John Barr and me.

The 2025 Deep Sea Blue Chips

Berkly Catton tops the Deep Sea Blue Chips as Seattle’s top prospect in the eyes of national analysts. This is hardly a surprise, but it may be a little more interesting that it wasn’t a consensus view. Elite Prospects ranked Jake O’Brien ahead of Catton in their recent rankings. I dug into their rationale last week. Overall, O’Brien checks in at No. 2 here.

Public analysts are bullish on Seattle’s 2025 second-round pick Blake Fiddler, who lands at No. 3 on this list. You can read up on Fiddler’s game in our Film Room feature. Next is 2023 second-round pick Carson Rehkopf, who has piled up goals at the OHL level, but will now look to transition that skill set to the professional level.

Interestingly, 2022 second-round pick Jagger Firkus rounds out the top five. After leading the CHL in scoring during his previous campaign, the undersized Firkus debuted in the AHL with a solid rookie effort last season, showing developed off-puck habits that could be a harbinger of better things to come. I’m inclined to believe that the national analysts have Firkus this high based on his junior resume. That said, I have to admit that I found a lot to like about his professional game last season, and while it will still take some time, I’m now fairly bullish on his future.

The Kraken have a deep prospect pool; is it elite?

Group wisdom puts the Kraken prospect pool somewhere around No. 8 in the league. (Interestingly, this is also where Seattle’s farm system ended up when ranked by total number of Top-100 prospects in our “data-only” analysis. Check out our 2025 NHL-affiliated prospect ranking here.)

Steven Ellis of Daily Faceoff, Corey Pronman of The Athletic, and McKeen’s Hockey all view the Kraken as a top-seven system, complimenting the organization both for its depth and the high-end talent at the top in the form of Berkly Catton. Elite Prospects, which ranked the Kraken No. 13 overall, is slightly cooler on Catton, which likely impacted the ranking significantly because Elite Prospects was also complimentary of the team’s depth.

At the end of the day, the progress and performance of Seattle’s high-end players, particularly Catton, will determine whether the system is “elite” or merely “good.”

The Sound Of Hockey Seattle Kraken prospects ranking

Without further ado, let’s get to the inaugural Sound Of Hockey prospects ranking. Again, the ranking is an average of subjective assessments from John Barr and me. We broke ties by ranking the player with the higher “high” rank first. We proceeded accordingly through the top 20 and ties. Then we also ranked any player that received a top-20 vote from either of us. This process resulted in a ranked list of your top 24 Seattle Kraken prospects.

What stands out? What did we mess up? You can let us know in the comments. John and I will now debate it.

Seattle Kraken prospects ranking roundtable

Which Kraken prospect is most overlooked by the general prospect community?

John Barr: Nikke Kokko probably doesn’t get talked about enough, and when he does, it feels like another Kraken goalie prospect, Kim Saarinen, often gets ranked ahead of him. I get that goalies are really tough to project, but Kokko was one of the youngest goalies in the AHL last season and still put up some of the best numbers. He’s trending really well to step into the NHL in a couple of years and has elevated his game at every stage of his career so far.

Curtis Isacke: I agree with you on Kokko, John. Extrapolating to the goalies generally, it was baffling to me last season when Kokko was topping AHL rookies, and Kim Saarinen and Semyon Vyazovoi were leading their respective European professional leagues in save percentage, that none of them could garner any national recognition. That’s slowly starting to come, with Elite Prospects mentioning Vyazovoi, Corey Pronman preferring Saarinen, and McKeen’s ranking Kokko highly. It still seems like Kokko’s work is under-recognized.

Which ranking on the other person’s list was the biggest surprise?

Curtis: On the upside, I was pleasantly surprised to see how high you were on the goalies. As mentioned, I think you’re onto something there. Also, I like the bet on Eduard Sale’s talent, even if I was hesitant to go there. We often forget how young he is still. I’ll throw Ville Ottavainen’s name out there. While I think his play plateaued a bit this past season, he has the tools and experience to be a third-pair NHL defender soon. If the goal is to sort NHL players from those who may fall short of that level, I think he may outperform the public analyst consensus (No. 19) and come closer to your ranking. If the goal is to project upside, perhaps the national consensus is closer. On the downside, I’ll say Ty Nelson for some of the same reasons. I think he has legitimate third-pair NHL defenseman potential, which likely justifies ranking him a bit higher than No. 26.

John: I think we’re in the same ballpark on most prospects, with just a few bigger variances here and there. But maybe the biggest surprise was you ranking Caden Price at No. 9 when I had him at 17. Funny enough, I wrote earlier this week that he tends to fly under the radar, so I do like the player, I just don’t see his ceiling being quite as high compared to some of the other guys in my top 10. I’m excited to see how he plays in the AHL, but I probably need to see a full year from him before moving him up.

Which prospect could make my ranking look bad in a year?

John: Eduard Sale. I haven’t given up on him, and he still shows flashes where you see exactly why he was a first-round pick in 2023. But the cold stretches are just too frequent right now. Last season he was a 19-year-old in the AHL, so it’s not like anyone expected him to dominate, but there are plenty of examples of 19-year-olds who had much stronger seasons at that level. For me, he absolutely needs to show progress this year if he’s going to hold his spot in my top 10 by the end of the season.

Curtis: Oh, interesting! I was just complimenting you on what I thought was already a high ranking. In a similar vein, I’ll say David Goyette. This is a player who paced the OHL in scoring a couple years ago and fell out of our top 24 after just one (admittedly difficult) professional season. He needs to make big physical and processing gains to get his head above water at the AHL level, but he has the skill to do it. He could make my ranking look bad.

Which prospect has the most to prove this year?

John: There are a lot of candidates, but I’ll go with Ryan Winterton. He needs to break through this year if he’s going to make it. We’ve been excited about him for a while, and he even made his NHL debut back in Nov., 2023, but he hasn’t really shown yet that he should stick. Compare that with Jani Nyman’s debut, Winterton was in a fourth-line role, while Nyman was paired with Eberle and got some power-play time. So maybe that’s not a totally fair comp, but the bottom line is Winterton needs to establish himself, either by lighting it up in the AHL or proving he belongs in the NHL.

Curtis: Several of the returning AHLers come to mind for me. You picked a good one in Winterton, John. I’ll mention Goyette and Sale as well, two players we have already touched on a bit. Both dealt with prolonged quite stretches last season. If either player is similarly unproductive this season, they could see their AHL playing time cut, given the increased competition in Coachella Valley this year.

Broadly speaking, what was the most challenging part of making your rankings?

John: Honestly? The whole thing. I like all the prospects and want them all to succeed, so ranking them almost feels like picking favorites. Obviously, some players are ahead of others, but I hate putting anyone outside the top 20. On top of that, comparing players in different stages of their development, playing in different leagues, with my limited viewings… it’s tough. At times it felt like putting chips on a craps table—sure, there are odds and probabilities, but in the end, anything can happen with these guys.

Curtis: Well put, John. I agree. We’ll leave it there for now. What did we get wrong? Let us have it in the comments below or X/Twitter or Blue Sky.