With the posting of the NHL Future Power Rankings, we're diving a little deeper into my take on one of those four categories: prospects.
I've broken the 30 NHL teams up into tiers based upon the strength (or lack thereof) of their prospect groups, based upon my research, as well as input from scouts and executives. For our purposes, a player is considered a prospect if he played 25 or fewer NHL games last season, or has played 50 games or fewer total. He is an under-23 NHL player if he is 22 or under as of Sept. 15. Both groups are considered for this evaluation. Within each tier, teams are presented alphabetically.
References commonly are made to my Top 100 NHL Prospects list, so keep that tab open to follow along for deeper dives into particular players that I mention.
The top tier
The top three organizations in under-23 talent all seem poised for better results than they've had in recent seasons.
