Elite Prospects' 2025 Top 100 Under-23 Skaters Ranking

With a year-long wait between our annual top-100 prospect rankings here at Elite Prospects, we decided to add a new ranking to our rotation: Top-100 skaters, followed by a team-by-team ranking of every organisation’s under-23 talent later in the week.

“Who would you rather have?” or “Who will have the most valuable prime?”

Those two questions guided our formation of this list, but both are tricky to answer.

First, we looked at upside and the role we project the players to occupy. That was the most influential factor, closely followed by the probability of achieving said upside or role. Of course, that means NHLers rose above prospects with similar upside. It also means that the goal of the under-23 ranking is slightly different from a prospect-only ranking, so some prospects received bumps that won’t necessarily be reflected in our summer top 100.

As usual, we considered usage, production, and advanced stats, as well as market value and organisational fit. Centres and defencemen received a slight edge when necessary. Players falling out of favour with their team or with the league in general were pushed lower. The up-and-comers who have an easy path to a top role in their lineup climbed a bit higher.

This ranking—nor any ranking—is a perfect exercise, no matter how many hours we spend watching and rewatching these prospects and comparing their profiles. We have our preferences and biases, just like everyone who will look at this list.

With this ranking, we want to give readers an idea of where their team’s top young players rank across the league, how they’ve evolved in recent seasons, and how our previous prospect and draft rankings hold up.

To keep things simple, the criteria is this: Born on September 16th, 2001 or later, to ensure that the entirety of the 2020 NHL Draft class is eligible. That means that re-entries picked in 2020, like Mason Lohrei, aren’t eligible, nor are players drafted in 2019 or earlier. 

With that out of the way, here’s our top 100 with analysis, grades, and more.