Apparently they’re fresh off a dump of snow in southern Alberta, and that makes perfect sense to me. After all, Christmastime is coming.
The NHL draft has been my Christmas for a long time, my favorite day on the hockey calendar and one which I have circled from the moment it’s announced. Working in the WHL and getting to see many of the most impressive prospects up close has only enhanced my enjoyment of the draft, and in my four seasons covering the league I’ve been downright spoiled by the talent level on display and the run of first-round picks the WHL currently enjoys.
This year, I’m likely to be more spoiled than most. For one thing, it’s shaping up to be an incredible, maybe even historic first round for the WHL (more on that later). For another, this has the potential to be a pivotal draft for the Brandon Wheat Kings.
NHL Central Scouting’s rankings aren’t a guarantee of anything, but they are a strong indicator. The Wheat Kings have five players ranked by NHL Central Scouting going into the draft, and there are two other Wheat Kings who, from conversations with scouts and earlier iterations of Central Scouting’s rankings, I know are firmly on NHL radars.
Now, are all seven players going to be drafted? Just mathematically it may seem unlikely. There are only so many picks in any given draft, and deserving players go unselected every year. It’s why there are so many success stories in the NHL outside of the draft, and why so many players who don’t get drafted end up invited to NHL development camps.
Yet if you look at each of those seven players individually (as we are about to do), you can see plenty of reasons why each of them might be appealing to NHL teams. Frankly, not one of those seven players being drafted would be a shock to me. And part of the beauty of the draft is its unpredictability. Once you reach a certain point in the draft (and not very far into it at that) you can almost throw publicly available rankings out the window.
That said, you can predict fairly well which of the seven most likely draftees among the Wheat Kings is going to go first. And the closer we get to the draft, the higher the consensus seems to place him.
- You could convincingly argue no player advanced his case at the NHL draft combine more than Roger McQueen. It wasn’t so much that teams were desperate to see how many pull-ups he could do (nine, if you’re wondering) as they wanted to see that he could participate fully in testing and satisfy themselves that he was healthy. Roger used the gathering of scouts, executives, and media, to show the hockey world that the worst of his injury troubles were caused by an initial misdiagnosis and were now behind him. Now that’s exciting for Wheat Kings’ fans (Roger was over a point-per-game the last two seasons while dealing with back pain, so what can he do now that he’s pain-free?) and apparently it’s exciting for NHL teams as well. This time of year I pour over as many mock drafts and rankings as I can get my hands on, and Roger is now a top-ten pick on the overwhelming majority of them. In fact, several prominent scouting agencies have him in the top-five. The conversation around Roger is now less about his injury trouble and more about his upside, which is enormous. A 6-foot-5 right-handed center with elite puck skills across the board and a physical edge who sees Ryan Getzlaf as his best comparable? Teams ought to be lining up, and if they’re convinced he’s healthy, they will be.
- A quick aside about Roger that has nothing to do with his injury or his hockey ability. If you missed it, after the Wheat Kings made their picks in the WHL Prospects Draft in early May, Roger made a point of personally reaching out to every single one of those young men to welcome them to the team. Now, you can do the math on this one. Roger is a 2006-born player who is about to be a first-round NHL pick (the 25th in Wheat Kings’ history) and is almost certain to be in the professional ranks in 2026-27. The players the Wheat Kings just drafted were born in 2010, and won’t be starting their Wheat Kings’ careers before 2026. If they’re called up during this coming season, frankly, it’s most likely to be at a time when Roger is away with Team Canada at the World Juniors. Aside from one training camp this fall, they may never share the ice together as Wheat Kings. So why did Roger think it was important to reach out to all of them like that? Simple: he told me remembered a time when a veteran Wheat King in the same situation (Ridly Greig) did the same for him, and he wanted to pay it forward. He said he wanted to be for those young kids what Greig had been for him, and wanted them to feel welcome to approach him and ask questions at their first training camp. It was an unprompted display of leadership that I hope NHL teams took notice of. Apparently, they noted that he spent much of his rehab time being around the team this season and spent practices on the bench trying to keep his teammates in good spirits. Everybody who’s ever watched Roger play knows he’s a big body with skill, but teams that do their homework (and plenty have done it; 24 teams interviewed him at the combine) know there’s more to him than that.
- An aside within an aside: the drafted Wheat Kings I spoke to said other players had reached out to them as well. Two names I heard every single time: Jaxon Jacobson and Gio Pantelas. The future of the leadership group with the team seems to be doing just fine, and the close-knit dressing room they’ve had for the last couple of seasons seems to be as well.
- Now, back to the draft. Roger wasn’t the only Wheat King who used the combine to his advantage. Carter Klippenstein went in with a mind to not only show teams his shoulder injury was healed, but to show just how dedicated he is off the ice, and he delivered big time. Carter told me he wanted to earn an invite to the combine all season specifically because he knew he could boost his stock with the testing. Once he arrived in Buffalo, and after interviewing with a dozen teams himself, he got to work. Seven top-ten results, including a first-place finish in right side agility, made him one of the more impressive performers of the day and no doubt upped his standing in the eyes of NHL teams. Now, there’s no direct correlation between how much you can bench press and how good of a hockey player you are (trust me, I’ve looked) but there is a correlation between how dedicated and driven you are, how committed you show yourself to be, and how NHL teams perceive you. Klippenstein was clearly already on NHL radars or he wouldn’t have been at the combine to begin with, and now they’ve seen his commitment level firsthand. His strong showing there helped him, though perhaps not as much as the Florida Panthers winning the Stanley Cup helped him; Klippenstein plays exactly the kind of aggressive, physical, in-your-face style that just led the Panthers to their second straight cup, and his style of play is en vogue now more than ever. One prominent mock draft now has him climbing into the second round (49th overall to Montreal) and I’ve no doubt the Panthers winning another title and his own style of play meshing so well with theirs boosted him.
- As someone who follows the draft religiously, I was quite surprised last year when Luke Mistelbacher went undrafted. His late birthday meant he was a first-time eligible, and he was fresh off a 20-goal 50-point season in more of a depth role with a Swift Current team loaded with 2004-born forwards. His size wasn’t an issue at six feet tall and 194 pounds, and his speed certainly wasn’t an issue either. Both that speed and shot were on full display last season, with the Broncos moving him into a starring role, and I wonder if there aren’t a few teams thinking they missed the boat on him. Mistelbacher is a top-100 player on NHL Central Scouting’s final list, so it seems likely someone will remedy their mistake this time around. Some teams are put off a bit by the thought of drafting an “overage” player but every year there are success stories at the draft of players like that. You’re not drafting players for who they are at 18 but who you think they’ll be into their 20s, and in terms of development, not many players who actually were drafted in 2024 outdid Mistelbacher. In fact, of all the CHL players drafted in 2024, only three in the entire country (and none in the WHL) outscored Mistelbacher’s 42 goals. A team could’ve had him for a seventh-round pick last season, but it seems unlikely he’ll be had so cheaply in 2025.
- Displaying a similar skillset to Mistelbacher when he’s at his best, Joby Baumuller will be an interesting case to watch on draft day. In the first half he had an otherworldly run of bad luck where he’d be in prime shooting position, locked and loaded for a one-timer, and his stick would simply fold in half on him. That bad luck shifted in the second half, however, and Joby got to display his pro-calibre shot far more regularly, with 14 of his 18 goals coming in 33 games in the post-Christmas schedule. It’s not just that he scored, but the way that he scored that should attract NHL notice. Run through the goals he scored this season and you see a shooter who just overpowers goaltenders with a bomb of a shot. He has the footspeed and quick release to be a pure goal-scorer, and a big jump in production this coming season is not at all out of the question. But even without his shooting prowess, he has some other skills that should grab NHL teams’ attention. He’s got a lot of speed and strength, and when he uses it on the forecheck (here again we must tip our cap to the Florida Panthers) he can run opponents over. And if push comes to shove, Joby is not afraid to defend himself or his teammates. He fought four times last season, grabbing a hold of noted WHL scrappers in three of them, and handled himself well all four times. At the high end, his skills might translate to goal scoring at the next level, but even if they don’t he’s got another skillset that will enable him to be a pro.
- By his own admission, there’s no certainty that a double-overager like Grayson Burzynski will get drafted, but when I spoke to him after the Wheat Kings picked him up in trade he said he’s got high hopes for being invited to an NHL development camp either way, and you can see why. What team doesn’t want a 6-foot-4 defenseman who can move the puck? Burzynski finished with 11 goals and 47 points in 62 games last season, and on a Wheat Kings team that promises to have no trouble putting the puck in the net next season it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see that total climb once again. He also told me he wants to make a point of using his body more next season and becoming more of a physical presence, which is also something teams will like to hear. As mentioned, he’s a third-time eligible for the draft, and teams can be wary of those, but his offensive skillset took such a leap forward last season that, thanks in no small part to his size, he’s an intriguing prospect.
- This brings us to the two Wheat Kings’ forwards about whom I’ve had regular conversations with NHL scouts even though they didn’t crack Central Scouting’s final ranking. Jordan Gavin not being on that final ranking is a bit of a head scratcher for me. He was on both the initial and mid-term rankings, and did not by any means have a bad season with the Wheat Kings (27 points in 33 games following the trade from Tri-City). He’s a former second-overall pick with back-to-back-to-back seasons over 50 points and mastery over just about every offensive skill. His hockey IQ is his calling card, but by no means his only weapon, and he had to adjust to an entirely new system on a team halfway across the continent midway through his season and still managed to produce offensively. This coming season, there will be no such adjustment. Talking to the Wheat Kings about Gavin, they certainly believe he can find another gear next season, and I’m of the same opinion (especially if he gets to play with a healthy Roger McQueen, a sniper like Luke Mistelbacher, or both). Of all the Wheat Kings who put up offensively solid seasons in 2024-25, Gavin is at or near the top of the list of breakout candidates. And as we’ve discussed, teams draft players with an eye toward development.
- If you ask NHL scouts, however, the Wheat King forward poised for perhaps the biggest breakout, and the one who I view as a dark horse draft candidate, is Brady Turko. An NHL scout (whose team I won’t identify here) and I had a long conversation about Brady one night in Brandon, in which I lamented that Brady was born just a little too soon to be eligible for the 2026 draft. I said that extra year to show off his puck skills and grow into his frame would do wonders for his perception among scouts. This particular scout smiled at me and said he was glad Brady was up for the draft this season. He told me Brady is the sort of player who you might be able to get by spending a sixth or seventh-round pick this season. But if you have to wait until next year, in his view, you’ll be spending a third-round pick to get him because he is poised for such a giant step forward. “He’s going to pop off,” were, I believe, his exact words. At a glance, Brady’s 26 points in 68 games are solid but don’t scream “must-draft”. But scouts look for more than just points when they’re evaluating a player, and at least some of them have seen something in Brady’s game they really like. This scout referenced Brady’s incredible leap forward in his second U18 AAA season and said the tools were there for him to produce like that in the WHL too. If nothing else, Wheat Kings’ fans can look forward to Brady finding that offensive stride next season. Both he and Jaxon Jacobson, who has been his running mate for much of his career, are among the many breakout candidates for the Wheat Kings up front in what promises to be an important year.
As you can probably tell by the sheer length of this article, I’m excited for the draft. That’s true every year, but this year promises not only to be a big year for the Wheat Kings (and a potentially massive one as you can tell) but a big year for the WHL as a whole. I consume mock drafts and rankings endlessly, and the fewest WHLers I’ve seen in the first round of these rankings so far is nine. Nine! More than a quarter of the first round coming from the WHL would be an incredible feather in the league’s cap.
But most of these rankings even go a step further. I regularly see ten WHLers in the first round of both mock drafts and player rankings. Where those individual players end up varies from list to list, naturally, but ten players from the WHL in the top-32 is commonplace on pre-draft rankings. Those rankings don’t always count for much, not least because picks get traded fairly regularly, but its a hugely promising sign going in. For the record, the last time the WHL had ten players chosen in the first round of a draft was 1982. There have been some great drafts for the league since then (nine in 2014 is the most recent) but this could be a historic draft for the WHL.
This has turned out to be the longest of these blog posts to date, and that’s without even getting into the bevy of NCAA speculation that now surrounds the league. If you’ve stuck it out through this entire behemoth of an article, I thank you for your support and dedication. And knowing Wheat Kings fans as I do, more than a few of them will have stuck it out for the entire thing.
I make no promises about any of the individual players listed above. Draft day brings its own special brand of chaos, and anything can happen. But not one of those seven players being selected would surprise me. And there might even be others I haven’t named who could hear their names called. I would never be happier to have made an oversight.
And after the draft, once development camp rosters are released and the Import Draft has taken place, I expect we’ll have more to talk about again.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
