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

With activity about to ramp up, there’s no better time to submit our second-annual 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 the definitive Sound Of Hockey ranking. At the end of this post, we’ll debate how our rankings turned out, as well as a couple of bigger-picture topics.

Sound Of Hockey Seattle Kraken prospect ranking

Our ranking is an average of subjective assessments from John Barr and me. Ties are broken by ranking the player with the higher “high” rank first. We proceeded accordingly through the top 25 and ties. Then, we also ranked any player that received a top-25 vote from either of us. This process resulted in a ranked list of 29 top prospects. We added the next-highest-ranked player (Jakub Fibigr) because “top 30” sounds better than “top 29.”

Here is a breakout of each writer’s lists:

Professional analyst Kraken prospect rankings

Interested in more rankings? Several professional scouting services and analysts have put out Seattle Kraken prospect pool rankings this summer following the 2026 NHL Draft:

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

McKeen’s and Wheeler have the Kraken as their seventh-best prospect pool overall. Ellis has the Kraken with his No. 13 overall pool—down from No. 7 last year. Pronman evaluates each team’s total pool of players aged 22 or younger, whether or not the players are “prospects.” He has the Kraken as possessing the sixth-best collection of such players.

Kraken prospect roundtable discussion

Share a little insight on your methodology for the rankings:

John: My methodology isn’t particularly formulaic. Generally, I tried to rank players based on the impact I think they’ll ultimately have at the NHL level. For example, I think Nikke Kokko (No. 16 on the list) is likely to become a regular NHL player, but I don’t think his upside is as high as someone like Casey Mutryn (No. 8). Similarly, Jacob Melanson (No. 13) has a realistic path to spending an entire season on the Kraken roster in 2026-27, but I don’t see him having the kind of impact Jagger Firkus (No. 5) could have if he reaches his ceiling.

Curtis: In terms of list eligibility, I used the same thresholds I used when creating the data-only prospect ranking. For skaters: 23 years old or younger as of Sept. 1, 2026, and fewer than 50 NHL games. For goalies: 24 years old or younger as of the same date, and fewer than 30 NHL games.

This approach resulted in one exclusion from my list of a player who figured onto John’s: Ville Ottavainen. Ottavainen just missed my list criteria (he turned 24 in August), and I do still believe there is a possible future with him as a No. 6 or fringe NHL defenseman for years. John was right to rank him, and Ottavainen probably should have figured more prominently on our combined list as a result.

When ordering the prospects, I tried to formulate tiers based on projected NHL contributions if the player hits a realistic NHL upside—an outcome I currently believe could happen even while recognizing most players won’t hit these ceilings. When two players are next to each other on the list, I tend to ask myself: If I could only have one in the system, which one would I choose?

If Berkly Catton were still eligible for your list, where would he rank? How about Shane Wright?

John: I’d probably have Catton second behind Chase Reid. His development last season was really encouraging, and there were plenty of moments where he showed the kind of high-end skill that can make a difference at the NHL level.

Wright is a difficult one, but I’d likely put him between Catton and Jake O’Brien. We already know Wright can play and produce in the NHL when he’s at his best. O’Brien may ultimately end up higher, but there’s still some uncertainty because we haven’t seen him make the jump to the NHL yet.

Curtis: I’m pretty much of the same mind. Catton may be a bit undervalued because he was challenged with a full-time NHL role as a 19-year-old. I’d slot him above O’Brien still. Reid stays at No. 1 over Catton only because I’m very high on the young blueliner’s combination of tools. I’d likely put Wright after Catton for the same reasons you mentioned but would consider moving him below O’Brien just because the younger forward may bring more pure offensive skill.

Which prospect has the most to prove this coming season?

John: I think this is a huge season for Jani Nyman. During his NHL stint last season, he struggled to keep pace and looked a bit overmatched. To his credit, he rediscovered his game in the AHL, but now he needs to show he can bring that success to the NHL level. Hopefully, the experience he gained during those NHL games helped him identify exactly where he needs to improve to become an everyday NHL player.

Curtis: I think you’re right about Nyman, John. Jagger Firkus is another “older” prospect whose time has come to either (a) truly dominate and drive offense at the AHL level (think 80+ points) or (b) prove he can hang at the NHL level when given the opportunity. A season where Firkus or Nyman treads water in the AHL would really put a dent in their profiles.

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

John: There weren’t many rankings that caught me off guard, but I did like your higher placement of Luken “Hawke” Huff. He’s an overage fifth-round pick who took a pretty unconventional road to get here, yet he keeps finding ways to succeed. After talking with him at development camp, what stood out most was how excited he is to be playing hockey. It may sound simple, but that kind of passion matters. He comes across as someone who loves the game, embraces the work, and is still motivated to get better every day.

Curtis: I love your confidence and aggressiveness on Tyson Jugnauth. As you and our readers know, I’ve long been a fan of the skill he can bring to the blue line, and, unlike some, I’m not afraid of smaller defensemen. Even so, I was surprised to see him at No. 3 on your list. Based on pure skill level, you could be right.

Did any player from prior drafts really pop last season and jump up your rankings?

Curtis: I wrote about it last week in Friday Film Room, but I just really liked watching Ty Nelson play hockey at the AHL level over the back half of the 2025-26 season. He doesn’t have the height or dynamic traits, but he does have a mind for the game, relentless work habits, and bulldog physicality. He took every role the coaching staff threw at him and rarely looked out of place. He rose from No. 17 on my list last year to No. 11 on my list this year. I’m confident there’s an (admittedly unconventional) NHL future there.

John: We’ve been tracking Jugnauth’s progression for a while, but it’s still pretty wild to have a fourth-round pick from 2022 sitting third in the Kraken prospect rankings. Yet here we are. In the viewings I had last season, he looked incredibly comfortable and confident with the puck. I’ve even caught a few of his informal skates at Kraken Community Iceplex over the past week, and even surrounded by NHL players, he stood out.

The other player who made a significant jump in my rankings was Loke Krantz. He’s only No. 22 on my list, but his development trajectory has already exceeded what you’d normally expect from a seventh-round pick.

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

Curtis: I’ll mention Viktor Fyodorov as a player I really enjoyed watching over the summer. That said, as a top-100 pick in the most recent draft, I’m not sure he’s a perfect fit for the “overlooked” category.

Two players with Coachella Valley may fit the bill a bit better. I thought Kaden Hammell (No. 24 on my list) had a solid rookie AHL season. The 2023 fifth-round defenseman came into the season layered behind many higher-drafted blueliners, including Nelson and Ottavainen, as well as fellow rookies Caden Price and Lukas Dragicevic. Yet, his defensive-zone physicality and transition skating game have translated as well or better than Price or Dragicevic so far.

I’ll also mention J.R. Avon (ineligible for my list) as a player who brings skating, forechecking, and enough skill in his hands to see NHL games at some point in the near future. He’s a dark horse.

John: There are certainly some prospect rankings out there that I disagree with, but I don’t know if there’s one specific player I’d call overlooked. Jakub Fibigr is someone who has shown meaningful progression every season since being drafted, but he still has a long way to go before I’d consider him underrated by the broader prospect community.

That said, I’ll use this opportunity to highlight Will Reynolds, the Kraken’s third-round defenseman from the 2025 draft class. Reynolds is young for his draft year and took an encouraging step forward in his development last season. I don’t put too much stock into prospect camp performances, but he stood out to me during development camp in July. There’s a lot of upside there that I think many of us may be underestimating.

Any area that was particularly challenging when making your rankings this year?

John: As I mentioned last year, the entire process is a challenge. There is always a handful of long-shot prospects who could end up surprising everyone, but they still need to be ranked somewhere. Unfortunately, that means someone has to land in the bottom 10.

I also struggled with where to place Barrett Hall and Ben McDonald. Outside of the July development camps, I simply haven’t had enough opportunities to watch either player, so I was forced to lean more heavily on their NCAA production and scouting reports than I’d prefer when forming my opinions.

Curtis: Ranking the goalies is a challenge for me. I don’t have access to Semyon Vyazovoi’s KHL games, and, even when I can see players on the ice, I’ll admit that I’m less confident in “evaluating” them when compared with skaters. Accordingly, I tend to fall back on numbers a bit more.

Vyazovoi and Kim Saarinen posted sterling results in their leagues—particularly when adjusting for their ages. For his part, Kokko played in the most challenging league last season (the AHL), as one of the youngest goalies in that league, and likely with the least defensive help of Seattle’s “big three” goalie prospects. Kokko’s raw results weren’t “good,” but he may have done a hair better than I had expected when adjusting for the difficulty of the context.

Even so, none of the big three figure prominently on league-wide lists of goaltending prospects. All of this leaves me scratching my head. If pressed into a take, I’d say this: I think they’re all good and underrated.

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Have any thoughts on Kraken prospects or any of the roundtable topics above? What did we get wrong? Let us have it in the comments below or X/Twitter or Blue Sky.