2026 NHL Draft Rankings Mammoth May Edition
Upside Hockey's Official Updated Top 224 ranked prospects for this NHL Draft class by Chief Rankings Officer Eldon MacDonald
Upside Hockey continues our in-depth prospect exploration, here’s our May Rankings for the 2026 NHL Draft from our Chief Rankings Officer, Eldon MacDonald.
Note: Draft Rankings Completed May 8, 2026
Compare to:
Our Top 83 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 & April-to-May Movement
McKenna & Stenberg Hold Firm: Gavin McKenna (#1) and Ivar Stenberg (#2) remain locked into the top two spots on the board. Carson Carels remains entrenched at #3 overall.
Caleb Malhotra Climbs to #4: Malhotra moves up to #4 overall (up from #6 in April) after an elite playmaking finish to his season with Brantford in the OHL.
The Risers:
Just to highlight some of the movement:
The Ruck Twins Surge: Both brothers rocket into the Top 20:
Liam Ruck: Moves to #17 (up from #22)
Marcus Ruck: Moves to #18 (up from #27)
Wyatt Cullen: impressed our Eldon MacDonald enough to launch him into our top 10 at #10, up all the way from #26 in April.
Thomas Bleyl: vaulted up to #26 (up from #36 in April) with his elite offensive production (81 points) from the blue line in Moncton.
Adam Goljer: after an impressive World U18s, the defenseman has leaped into first round territory to #31 from #48 back in April.
Maksim Sokolovsky: the mammoth physical blueliner had a meteoric rise up to #34 from #90 in April.
The Fallers:
William Hakansson: He fell 14 spots (From 18 down to 32) in April and now 14 more in May down to #46 from #32.
Nikita Klepov: is down 7 slots from #13 to #20
Oliver Suvanto: the centreman fell 5 more spots to #23 from #18 after trending the wrong way in April as well (down 8 spots from 10 down to 18). He still may very well go higher come Draft Day as teams covet centres.
Our Top 224 with notes:
Rank column is our current rank of the prospect (perhaps obvious, but to be clear)
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.
Link to the full massive rankings spreadsheet with many features at Upside.
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