The Elite Prospects April top-75 ranking for the 2025 NHL Draft

With the regular seasons over and the under-18 World Junior Championships around the corner, it’s time for Elite Prospects’ penultimate 2025 NHL Draft ranking. 

This time, it’s a top 75, featuring some pretty significant movement since our previous ranking back in late-January. 

For the most part, we’ve seen this draft as having a clear top five, but there’s becoming some clear division: Matthew Schaefer and Michael Misa at Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, followed by a larger tier of players that could even stretch into the early teens, depending on who’s asked. 

The mid-first-to-late-first of the draft is even more wide open, with at least a dozen similarly valuable prospects across a variety of different archetypes. A player ranked at 25 could justifiably move up at least 10 spots on this board. 

Still, we have our preferences as a team, and though there is variation between evaluators, the board closely reflects our emphasis on skill, dynamic elements, and potential to fill a role if the first two don’t fully translate to the next level. 

Dipping into the late-first and beyond, there’s an exciting mixture of high-upside swings up front, toolsy defencemen who could become legitimate top-four options with their unique skills, and some high-probability bets to become NHLers. Further emphasizing the latter, this is a draft of tall, physical players. As such, we expect to see a lot of NHLers from this draft in the future, even if there’s not quite as much pure scoring upside as other years overall.

Now, let’s talk about specifics.