QMJHL Stock Watch: Bill Zonnon back to his best in Blainville-Boisbriand
A lot can change in two months in the CHL — especially if those two months kick off with a particularly busy trade deadline.
At the top of the standings, the Moncton Wildcats made a couple of key moves on the back end while recovering some picks in the process. Their forward core having remained intact is a vote of confidence in their current pool of attackers, highlighted by the ever-increasing draft stock of Niko Tournas.
Unsurprisingly, the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada made a massive splash, adding veteran blueliner and Tampa Bay Lightning prospect Jan Golicic to their defence core and also the league’s best draft-eligible netminder in William Lacelle. The expectations in Blainville are clear: win the Gilles-Courteau trophy, and give the CHL a run for its money at the Memorial Cup.
An addition they made in the summer, however, has stolen the show since his return from injury. We kick off this month’s Stock Watch with the Pittsburgh Penguins’ latest first-round pick.
Stock Rising 📈
Bill Zonnon, LW/C, Blainville-Boisbriand Armada (Pittsburgh Penguins)
Bill Zonnon has had some horrendous luck to start the year. A knee injury kept him out of Pittsburgh’s training camp action and a decent chunk of the start of the QMJHL campaign, and when he came back in early November, he immediately got injured again, sidelining him until late December.
Thankfully, Zonnon’s luck is turning the corner — and so have his performances.
With 11 points in his last six games and 23 points in 17 matches on the season now, Zonnon has taken a foothold on Blainville’s top line with Justin Carbonneau and Vincent Desjardins. The latter has especially benefitted from Zonnon’s return, as the two have developed undeniable chemistry. Both play a high-grit, high-intensity checking game complemented by some impressive playmaking reads, and the pair has seen an uptick in their goal-scoring output as a result of the high-end chances they set up for each other.
While Zonnon’s skating still represents a hurdle to the NHL — his elite checking sequences can occasionally lead to extended board time as a result of his acceleration lagging behind — he has everything else to be a high-end checking piece for the Penguins long-term. His work rate is unparalleled in the league, his release continues to trend in the right direction, his defensive positioning and wall support are refined, he moves off-puck in the offensive zone with purpose and forethought, and he can bulldoze through contact with relative ease, even against the QMJHL’s biggest, meanest, and strongest opponents.
Even without the pure mechanics, Zonnon’s straight-line top speed is good enough to win him races, and his work rate and contact skills make him impossible to get off the puck once he gets to it first. The Armada are going all in this year, and Zonnon is likely to be a dominant part of the team’s Memorial Cup run.
Philippe Veilleux, C/LW, Val-d’Or Foreurs (2026 NHL Draft re-entry)
If finishing second in QMJHL scoring last year wasn’t enough to earn a draft pick, maybe leading the entire QMJHL by 10 points this time around will do it.
Philippe Veilleux is on a mission for the Foreurs, especially in 2026. He has been kept off the scoresheet only once this year, and currently sits on a 12-game point streak through February. More impressive than the scoring output, however, has been Veilleux’s progression as a dual-threat offensive creator.
The 19-year-old is seemingly operating at the peak of his confidence at the moment, blending creative dangles with tidy playmaking sequences to create advantages, leverage overloads, and force defences to scramble. His mid-range release remains an integral part of his offensive impact, and he is set to eclipse his 40-goal draft year this time around.
As Veilleux develops, continuing the progress in his contact skills will be key. We’re seeing flashes of it already — he is starting to lean into contact on retrievals, use his lower centre of gravity to slither out of checks, and target defencemen’s hands along the wall. Without size and special skating mechanics, the climb to the NHL is steep, but we’ve seen Conor Garland add game-breaking compete to his puck-acquisition game and become a more than serviceable NHL winger with the same disadvantages Veilleux currently has. That’ll be the blueprint, and if a team is confident in their ability to develop Veilleux similarly, he could be one of the first overagers off the board in 2026.
Niko Tournas, RW, Moncton Wildcats (2026 NHL Draft re-entry)
Speaking of tantalizing potential re-entry picks out of the QMJHL, Niko Tournas has arguably made the best case for an NHL draft selection among the league’s overagers so far.
With 33 goals and 55 points in 46 games for Moncton as a freshman, the 6-foot-2, 200-pound winger has been making use of his tremendous release to terrorize netminders from everywhere. The versatility in his scoring arsenal is phenomenal — he can stutter-step into a curled, shortened release to beat screens off the rush, he can blast one-timers from the half wall, and he can space himself in transition, find a pocket, and shoot off the catch.
His contact game has been improving over the last stretch; a much-needed development in his game despite his size. Where Tournas used to struggle to get to the inside on retrievals, he now directs them with clear intention. He targets defencemen’s gaps in scanning, digs his outside edges to leverage counterweight, and quickly finds an outlet through contact.
With some work on his standstill explosiveness and increasing his off-puck pace, Tournas could develop into a unique top-nine complementary sniper with size — a dream of a fourth-round selection for any team in the NHL.
Alexis Joseph, C, Saint John Sea Dogs (2027 NHL Draft)
What Alexis Joseph is doing this season as a 16-year-old is simply not normal. Since his birth year, only Nathan McKinnon, Alexis Lafrenière, and Sean Couturier have had better point-per-game tallies in their Draft-minus-one campaigns than Joseph’s 1.13. The rookie currently leads his team in points with 45, and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, having only recently snapped a nine-game point streak in which he accumulated 12 points.
Joseph has gradually adapted his game to the QMJHL’s pace and patterns; where he used to look to isolate and pick apart defenders, he now delays off the rush, finds trailers, blends stutter steps into inside passes, and works cutbacks to allow support to come. He is developing a patient, meticulous approach that works wonders with his frame and protection details, without losing the impressive pace and fluidity that made him the QMJHL’s first-overall pick last summer.
In a 2027 NHL Draft already showing tons of promise, Joseph’s development into a complete and cerebral centre is slowly but surely pushing him to the top of a conversation led by the likes of Landon DuPont. Joseph is already one of the most refined power-play creators in the league, and the progression in his rush game shows the level of adaptability required to scale up to pro hockey as a 6-foot-4 centre with skill.
Stock Steady ↔️
Yegor Shilov, C, Victoriaville Tigres (2026 NHL Draft)
Undeniable skill and creative problem-solving abilities. Those are the game-breaking assets Yegor Shilov has brought to the table every single game since his move to Victoriaville.
The 18-year-old centre has developed instant synergy with Alexei Vlasov, and has become one of the league’s most potent setup creators. He controls the flow of play from the half wall, picks apart defensive-zone structures with his hands, and leverages skillful reads to evade pressure with a quick cut across an opponent’s heels.
The one thing keeping him from rising up our board at the moment is the pace, and it hasn’t taken the step we’re looking for yet. Shilov loves to create from a glide — he enters the zone with no more speed than is necessary, and once he’s in, he looks for delay options. He finds trailers, waits for teammates to zip into an area for the seam option, and then repositions in soft ice.
Shilov dropped seven spots in our last ranking as a result of not having built on the infrequent flashes of pace. We were betting on his game-breaking hockey sense to translate to more pace modulation with time, as he showed the occasional ability to use accelerations and decelerations as structure-solving tools. The fact that those infrequent flashes are part of his arsenal still offers first-round promise, but leaning on those tools moving forward and expanding that pace exploration to include his off-puck offence will be key to making the most out of his elite skill and sense.
Stock Falling 📉
Arseni Radkov, G, Saint John Sea Dogs (Montréal Canadiens)
Arseni Radkov just hasn’t had the season most hoped he would. After struggling behind one of the CHL’s deepest defence cores in Blainville, posting a .894 SV% and going 12-7-3 in his starts, the Armada opted for a change. They brought in 18-year-old netminder Lacelle and freed up their import roster spot to add Golicic by shipping Radkov, now their third-string goalie, off to Saint John.
Unfortunately, that change of scenery hasn’t done Radkov any favours, as the Canadiens’ third-round pick in 2025 has seen his save percentage drop to .885 behind a weaker Sea Dogs roster.
Technically, Radkov was always going to need to adjust. His stance sees his chest fall almost parallel to the ice when squaring up to pucks, forcing his elbows up and leaving room for armpit shots to squeak through. His tracking remains a strength, but his footwork lags behind, causing him to end up too deep, or too compact, or too low.
The netminder’s confidence seems shaken at the moment, but there’s runway to work with. His edges are powerful, he reads pucks’ trajectories well, and when he plays laid back the way he did in his draft year, he is incredibly difficult to beat. Finding that composure again while adjusting his technique to rely less on his hands will allow him to find a middle ground between calm and aggressive that better suits his tools.