The Elite Prospects 2025 WHL Prospects Draft top 50 ranking

The 2025 WHL Bantam Draft is just a couple of days away, and the excitement is palpable. 

This is the Maddox Schultz draft. The elite prospect has already drawn heaps of attention, dominating in his 14-year-old season while playing top U18 competition. He didn’t just clean out the awards in the SMAAAHL, but did the same at the Telus Cup, the Canada-wide U18 championship. 

It’s also a strong draft class overall. Liam Pue and Louis-Oscar Holowaychuk are two of the most explosive goalscorers in recent memory, while the electrifying Cruz Jim has the skill to become an elite offensive defenceman, just to name a few of the top players. 

It’s a draft that has top-end players in every archetype, unique players, and plenty who will make their way on the NHL Draft radar in the near future. 

This is not a prediction of how the actual draft will shake out, but a ranking of who we anticipate providing the most value in the league. We consider a combination of upside and probability of filling a top-six/top-four role. Skating, ability to make plays at speed (pace), puck skills, physical skills, motor, details, and more are considered, as is growth potential. And as usual, we show our work, with hundreds of game reports scattered across EP player pages.

We also have a new grading scale for this ranking. Instead of 1-9, it’s 0-100 with 5-point intervals. 50 represents WHL calibre, 70 equivalent to middle-six/pair-level, and 90 being the high-end tools that you’d expect to see in top-line and top-pair players. 

Here’s our debut WHL Bantam Draft ranking, complete with analysis, grades, and more for our top 50 skaters.