Weird - I don't like picking a goalie that early.

Granted he did have a great year in London.

Would've rather a trade back to acquire more picks.
- Brooks_Light

Agree. Didn’t want the 2nd used on a goalie rather it used for a skater. Maybe a goalie traded is coming soon idk.

Awesome thanks for this Yorky!

It's a great idea to be picking goalies in every draft (if possible) - but that early (2nd round) is unnecessary.

If they extend Demko it has to be at a low $ and term - as he's not proven he deserves it in any way in the last few years.

I'd assume Silovs is gone - his value is the highest its ever been (which isn't a lot) but hopefully a package that brings back a decent top6 Forward.
- Brooks_Light

I don’t see a top 6 F package maybe a ‘26 3rd.

Picks are looking more like fence swingers &/or projects.

Weird - I don't like picking a goalie that early.

Granted he did have a great year in London.

Would've rather a trade back to acquire more picks.
- Brooks_Light

It’s not a video game unfortunately

Picks are looking more like fence swingers &/or projects.
- Nighthawk

It looks like they focused on centers with high motors and solid 2 way game.

It looks like they focused on centers with high motors and solid 2 way game.
- Bettmanhatesus

Several other teams went with big heavy players.

Several other teams went with big heavy players.
- Nuckerwhatever

Size was targeted this year. My Flyers went big and heavy.

Several other teams went with big heavy players.
- Nuckerwhatever

Just saw this from Frank.



2025 #NHLDraft recap:

Nationality
🇨🇦 88 (most since 2016)
🇺🇸 50
🇸🇪 27 (most since 2020)
🇷🇺 21
🇨🇿 9
🇫🇮 9

League
USHL: 40
OHL: 38 (9 in first round)
WHL: 33 (9)
Swe Jr: 28
Russia Jr: 21
QMJHL: 19

Size 📏
Fewer than 30 of 224 picks were under 6-foot.

Global Reach 🌎
17 birth countries, most in 21 years.
First Draft with two players born in China.
Highest ever drafted players born in Australia and Croatia.
Eighth Slovenian born skater and fourth Italian born draft picks.

School 🎓
Six players from U.S. high schools.
Two from Ontario high schools.
Ten directly from NCAA programs, with many more set to attend college after Draft.

Several other teams went with big heavy players.
- Nuckerwhatever

One more thing.



“Had a chat with someone in the Flyers war room this AM. Couple notes:
1. They thought Martone was going to Nashville at 5. Were “f**king pumped” when he didn’t.
2. Had intel that Nesbitt was definitely being drafted by Vancouver at 15 and a likelihood Detroit would take him at 13.”

One more thing.



“Had a chat with someone in the Flyers war room this AM. Couple notes:
1. They thought Martone was going to Nashville at 5. Were “f**king pumped” when he didn’t.
2. Had intel that Nesbitt was definitely being drafted by Vancouver at 15 and a likelihood Detroit would take him at 13.”
- Dave21Brown

Even in the 2nd round your Flyers were picking up big and good players.

I say the Flyers easily won this draft.

It looks like they focused on centers with high motors and solid 2 way game.
- Bettmanhatesus

Yes I noticed that as well 👍🏻

Even in the 2nd round your Flyers were picking up big and good players.

I say the Flyers easily won this draft.
- Nuckerwhatever

NYI

NYI
- Nighthawk

NYI cleaned up. They rebuilt more yesterday than we have in 10 years

NYI
- Nighthawk

They did alright.

From Drance. A good, optimistic look at a couple of the kids just drafted:

One can fairly quibble with some of the picks that Vancouver made from a value perspective, although there’s perhaps more sneaky upside in this draft class than first meets the eye, as we’ll get into in this notebook.

One can, likewise, reasonably second-guess the seemingly reactive approach in which the club seemed primarily focused on drafting centre depth, which is rather conveniently their biggest need at the NHL level.

However, projecting the future development of teenage hockey players is a wildly tricky exercise. A crapshoot of the truest sort, with a rate of success and a far higher rate of attrition that’s virtually indistinguishable over large samples from pure randomness.

If the Canucks, or any organization for that matter, is going to mine meaningful talent from the draft process, their best approach isn’t to exclusively bet on prospect scoring profiles. It isn’t to bet on athletic traits, above all else, either. And it isn’t exclusive to focus on players who had playoff success, or tournament success, and were able to come through in the biggest games.

No, the cheat code is simply to make picks at high volume. The more picks you have, and the earlier those picks are made, the higher the probability is of returning meaningful NHL value down the line.

At the 2025 NHL Draft, Vancouver made two selections in the top 50 and three selections in the top 70. They had a pick in every round of the draft, save for the fourth.

For the first time in a long time the Canucks will emerge from the draft with a proper class. That’s something worth being bullish on.
The goalie

With the 47th pick, the Canucks selected Aleksei Medvedev from the London Knights.

Medvedev wasn’t extremely high on the public’s radar as a high-upside goaltending prospect, but the league itself very much was. I spoke to representatives from multiple teams picking within 10 picks of No. 47 that rated Medvedev highly, and had him pushed high up their lists.

The 6-foot-3 netminder served as the Knights’ backup last season, and despite garnering serious interest from some of the top NCAA programs, will remain with London next year, where he’ll be expected to be the starting netminder.

“I want to be the guy, and I want to play a lot of games,” Medvedev told the media on Saturday. “I want to win next year, so I’m really, really excited. Lot of work to do next summer.”

Medvedev has lived in North America for the last four years, while his parents — who weren’t able to get their visas in time to attend the draft, although Medvedev’s sister goes to school in Los Angeles and was able to be there — have remained back home in Russia. He’s lived with billet families over the years, and Medvedev has pursued his dream of being a professional goaltender with an incredible level of independence and maturity at a precocious age.

In London, he was a popular teammate. He was dialled in, involved and worked hard to prepare his teammates at practices, even though he wasn’t utilized as the Knights went on an incredible winning streak in the playoffs. He’s described by those close to him as having the sort of personality where he rarely has a bad day.

Medvedev was a favourite of Ian Clark. The well-regarded former goalie coach has a complicated relationship with the organization following his demotion from serving as the goalie coach and director of goaltending last summer, but his role as a goaltending scout isn’t simply an honorific. His finger prints are all over the Medvedev pick, which Canucks director of amateur scouting Todd Harvey noted after the draft.

“Obviously, Ian has a lot to say on that, and we look at the draft, and he wanted this pick, and we thought it was the right time,” Harvey said.

The Canucks are obviously flush in net at the moment, in fact, they probably have a trade to make in order to manage their risk of losing Calder Cup playoff MVP Artūrs Šilovs on waivers next fall. Goaltenders take years to develop into NHL-level puck stoppers, however, and Vancouver needed to add some volume at this position given that their last drafted goaltender was selected back in 2022.

The Medvedev selection has no impact on what’s next in contract extension talks with Thatcher Demko, which are proceeding positively, or with Šilovs on the trade market. This is about maintaining a consistent flow of talent through the organization.

Technically speaking, Medvedev was viewed by some teams — even those that would’ve strongly considered selecting him in the second round — as talented and raw. Despite him being one of the youngest netminders in this draft class the Canucks, however, seem to view Medvedev as being a little bit more refined technically.

Canucks evaluators viewed him as having an already evolved skill set, with efficient movement skills that help him read the game proactively. He’s also viewed as a well-balanced technical goaltender, which is a rare attribute for an athletic teenager who underwent a late growth spurt.

Or as Medvedev himself put it, more elegantly, “How simple I play really defines me.”
The athlete

With an early third-round selection, the Canucks picked Kieren Dervin out of St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ont., an elite prep school with a lengthy track record of producing NHL draft picks.

Dervin looks superficially like something of a low upside reach early in the third round, in that, usually when a team is picking in the top 70, you’d expect them to land a prospect who produced more than six points in 21 CHL games in their draft year.

This was a very odd year for junior-aged hockey players, however, given the shifting dynamic in the relationship between the CHL and the NCAA. And Dervin was very much caught up in that.

Selected as a 14-year-old by the Kingston Frontenacs in the OHL priority selection draft, Dervin eschewed the CHL path in order to preserve his eligibility to play in the NCAA. Instead, he went to St. Andrew’s College and was heavily recruited, committing to Penn State.

Midway through his first draft-eligible season, however, the eligibility rules changed. Suddenly, Dervin was able to play in the CHL and still be eligible to pursue his NCAA dream down the line.

“When he came to Kingston, we had an older team with a lot of depth; he didn’t have the same role,” Frontenacs general manager Kory Cooper said. “At St. Andrew’s, he’s on the first unit power play and playing as a top player in every situation. In Kingston, he was only with us periodically or down the stretch, and we had an established older team, so he just didn’t get the touches in as many situations.

“You’ll see it this year because he’s going to get the opportunity.”

Dervin spent his senior year shuttling between Kingston and Aurora, joining Kingston for a few days that didn’t conflict with his school and high school team’s schedule. He’d go up for a week over spring break, for example, and then be back, lighting it up for his high school team when school resumed.

Purely from a scoring profile perspective, Dervin’s OHL scoring stats look completely uninteresting. Especially in the third round.

Looking at his prep school production, however, his production pops. It’s just about peerless, which is very exciting, especially given that he’s coming out of a powerhouse St. Andrew’s program that has had a player drafted from it in nine consecutive NHL drafts.

There are also the standout athletic traits. Dervin absolutely crushed the combine, scoring top-10 in the Wingate fatigue test, second in the class in the vertical jump, sixth in the bench press and top-five in the pull-up tests.

“He’s a beautiful skater,” St. Andrew’s College coach David Manning told The Athletic on Saturday. “One of those guys with a gear that no one else on the ice can get to.

“He’s able to beat guys into areas because of that extra gear that he has, and that’s what sets him apart. He returned and came back as a senior this year and put it upon himself to make the difference every single game and he did that. He was dynamic, and bent to the game to him and carried us offensively. He was a top player at this level.”

There were evaluators with questions about Dervin’s motor and inconsistency in this process, which is likely why he fell to the third round. His game will certainly need to mature in the OHL next season, before he moves onto Penn State, but there’s more upside in Dervin than it might seem on first glance.
The brother

Like with Dervin, there’s a more interesting profile to Vancouver’s fifth-round pick Wilson Björck than it might initially seem.

The profile of a re-entry player in his second draft-eligible season who played the majority of his season in the Swedish junior league seems inauspicious on the surface.

However, Björck’s scoring rate at that level — he produced 67 points in 43 games while playing on a line with his higher-scoring younger brother Viggo Björck, a top prospect for the 2026 NHL Draft — is significant enough to represent value in the fifth round.

Looking through the history of J20 scoring rates, there are a variety of players who went on to have lengthy NHL careers or became top prospects, who produced similarly to Björck in their age-19 season. It’s a list of players that includes Edmonton Oilers forward Mattias Janmark and former Pittsburgh Penguins forwards Emil Bemstrom and Carl Hagelin.

Björck is bound for the NCAA next season, and the Canucks view him as a centre. It’s not a perfect profile necessarily, but in the fifth round, Björck qualifies as the sort of home-run cut on a player with a meaningful scoring profile that we’ve typically advocated for in this space. That he also plays a premium position is a bonus.

It’s not a video game unfortunately
- CanuckDon

I wouldn't know, I don't play video games fawkstick

Even in the 2nd round your Flyers were picking up big and good players.

I say the Flyers easily won this draft.
- Nuckerwhatever

Its the little victories I guess

Cus the Flyers haven't won so much as a player round in what? 6 years?

NYI cleaned up. They rebuilt more yesterday than we have in 10 years
- Jkuzzi

LOL grass is always greener with Canuck 'fans'

I remember back on draft day here in 2018 when everybody creamed their jeans over the islanders drafting Walhstrom, Dobson and Bode Wilde too - how'd that work out for them? Exactly

LOL grass is always greener with Canuck 'fans'

I remember back on draft day here in 2018 when everybody creamed their jeans over the islanders drafting Walhstrom, Dobson and Bode Wilde too - how'd that work out for them? Exactly
- Brooks_Light

https://www.nhl.com/canuc...-the-2025-nhl-entry-draft

of the 6 players the Canucks drafted just three were Canadian not a horrible draft for Allvin and Co. but going off the 50% rule.

From Drance. A good, optimistic look at a couple of the kids just drafted:
- York Newbury

Nice read up on Dervin. Thx

Buff ask for Byram is a 1st rd pick, one of Willander or D petey and a bottom 6 roster player.

Yes or No?

Buff ask for Byram is a 1st rd pick, one of Willander or D petey and a bottom 6 roster player.

Yes or No?
- Nighthawk

Hell no. Unless Hughes has said he won't re-sign, Byram is redundant and expensive – not only to acquire but to pay.

If Hughes won't re-sign, then flip him and use those assets to get Byram. Otherwise, kick rocks.

(That said, management has made a point of emphasis to acquire players who really want to play here. Maybe they're feeling a little burned by Miller and potentially Hughes?)

Hell no. Unless Hughes has said he won't re-sign, Byram is redundant and expensive – not only to acquire but to pay.

If Hughes won't re-sign, then flip him and use those assets to get Byram. Otherwise, kick rocks.

(That said, management has made a point of emphasis to acquire players who really want to play here. Maybe they're feeling a little burned by Miller and potentially Hughes?)
- York Newbury

Of course it is in the event if Hughes is going to leave. I was thinking on the price for Byram & if it’s a good swap. Also there would be adding the haul Hughes fetches.

Heh Reubs fyi finally made it up your way & at the LNG. Sent you a PM.

https://www.facebook.com/...FNJGjrBH/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Reminds me of Darius Kasparaitis