2026 NHL Draft Rankings Final Edition
Upside Hockey's Official Updated Final Top 224 ranked prospects for this NHL Draft class by Chief Rankings Officer Eldon MacDonald
As we put the final touches on our soon to be released Upside Draft Guide, Upside Hockey continues our in-depth prospect exploration, here’s our Final Rankings for the 2026 NHL Draft from our Chief Rankings Officer, Eldon MacDonald.
Note: Draft Rankings Completed June 11, 2026
Compare to:
Our Top 107 Consolidated Draft Rankings (from all the top public rankings available from who deem the best sources are) - update coming soon
Upside’s own April Rankings (our mammoth in-depth spreadsheet)
Top 100 Final Rankings Big Board With Tiers by Trevor Curtis - our chief prospect profiler gives a different perspective on the draft class with a tier-based analysis
Key Trends & May-to-June Movement
McKenna & Stenberg Hold Firm: Gavin McKenna (#1), after some turmoil, did indeed go coast to coast as the number one ranked prospect. Ivar Stenberg (#2) remain locked in tat number two. Carson Carels remains entrenched at #3 overall.
Caleb Malhotra and Chase Reid: the OHLers continue to round out the top five.
The Risers:
Just to highlight some of the movement:
Super Swedes Malte Gustafsson and Viggo Björck have climbed into the Top 10 after sitting just outside in our May Rankings.
Maksim Sokolovsky: the behemoth physical blueliner had a meteoric rise up to #34 from #90 in our May Rankings and has now risen up to #23 in our Final Rankings.
Alexander Command: the two-way Swedish centre continues to impress and is now up to #16 (previously #21)
The Fallers:
Ryan Roobroeck: continues his slide from a potential top 10 pick at the start of the season, now down to #46.
Nikita Shcherbakov: he fell victim to the numbers game falling out of the first round of our rankings (was #28 in May Rankings) and now slotted as an early 2nd rounder at #36; come Draft Day he could easily be picked in the first round though.
Our Top 224 with notes:
Rank column is our current rank of the prospect (perhaps obvious, but to be clear)
The table below displays 20 prospects at a time (i.e. per page); simply click through the various pages in top right corner to scroll through complete rankings.
NHL column is our own combined version of NHL Central Scoutings’ Final Draft Rankings
The UH column (for Upside Hockey) indicates we have completed an in-depth profile on the prospect. This can be accessed via our full massive rankings spreadsheet over at our Upside Hockey website: Link
68G Eq Pts column: to more easily compare point totals of prospects across leagues we’ve elected to use the CHL leagues games played for a full season (i.e. 68 games). Thus, it’s a prospects points totals pro-rated to 68 games played. We are also working on a Dynamic NHLe (NHL equivalent point totals), so stay tuned for that - it will be displayed in our Quantum Upside Scores and Upside Prospect Cards in development for our Upside Draft Guide (stay tuned; check back to this link.
Link to the full massive rankings spreadsheet with many features at Upside.
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2026 Upside Draft Guide
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