Artyom Levshunov is No. 3 in Scott Wheeler's NHL Draft prospect rankings (2024)

The San Jose Sharks will pick first in June's NHL Draft, where they're expected to select Boston University center Macklin Celebrini.

Here's the draft order as decided by Tuesday's lottery.

1. San Jose Sharks
2. Chicago Blackhawks
3. Anaheim Ducks
4. Columbus Blue Jackets
5. Montreal Canadiens
6. Utah HC
7. Ottawa Senators
8. Seattle Kraken
9. Calgary Flames
10. New Jersey Devils
11. Buffalo Sabres
12. Philadelphia Flyers
13. Minnesota Wild
14. San Jose Sharks (via Pittsburgh Penguins)
15. Detroit Red Wings
16. St. Louis Blues

The top D prospect in a stellar crop for me, Artyom Levshunov finished second on the Big Ten-champion Spartans in scoring (35 points in 38 games) and first in goal differential (plus-27) as a freshman defenceman and is going to become the highest-drafted player ever out of Belarus, besting Ruslan Salei (No. 9 in 1996) and Andrei Kostit*yn (No. 10 in 2003). He had a stellar rookie season in the USHL (and in North America!) last year, registering 43 points in 65 combined regular-season and playoff games with Green Bay to fast-track his way into college hockey, and has continued on his steep upward progression since. It’s not easy to play big minutes to excellent two-way results, or produce at a near point-per-game rate as a teenaged D in college hockey, let alone one with a language barrier in a new culture who just two seasons ago had only ever played in Belarus. While he’s on the older side of the first-year eligibles for 2024 because of his October 2005 birthday, I don't think he's on a track that's far off the one Owen Power and his November birthday took.

Levshunov’s profile checks a lot of the boxes that teams are looking for in a high-end defenceman. He’s a righty with an extremely imposing and physically mature build already. He’s a smooth skater with plus-level four-way mobility (including a long, gazelle-like stride the length of the ice). Though he was a little green defensively when he arrived in the USHL, he has made fast progress and has really figured it out over the last two years (which included becoming a top penalty killer with the Gamblers after not starting there last year, and leading the Spartans in time on ice this year). His ceiling defensively is sky-high with the right development. That ceiling is led by a physical nature that regularly sees him bowl over opposing players (even on reverse hits) and outmuscle in 50/50 battles.

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Artyom Levshunov was No. 2 on my list for most of this season, but Ivan Demidov’s play during the MHL playoffs (which unfortunately ended due to a lower-body injury just prior to SKA winning the championship) crystalized him behind Macklin Celebrini down the stretch. He’s got the most individual puck skill in the class but I’ve also heard good things about his work ethic on and off the ice and he has developed some layers to his game so that he’s not a one-trick pony as a dancing offensive zone player.

Demidov is a skill-first playmaking forward who finished third in the MHL in scoring last year (extremely rare for a player that age in a league typically dominated by 19- and 20-year-olds) and played at a higher point-per-game pace than the two players in front of him alongside his older brother, Semyon. This season, after a strong preseason with SKA, he won a KHL job out of camp but played little and then, after bouncing between levels trying to rediscover his game, injured his knee and missed a month and a half. After returning, he tore up the MHL with one multi-point game after another and five to 10 shots a night, putting together one of the most productive extended stretches of play ever at Russia’s top junior level and making pretty goals look casual.

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After two weeks at U18 worlds in Espoo and Vantaa, Finland, my updated draft ranking includes full scouting reports on the top 32 prospects and 11 additional honorable mentions. It follows my way-too-early top 24, preseason top 32, preliminary top 64, midseason top 64, and March top 64, and will be followed by my final top 100 (released in early June).

The class of 2024 is led by Hobey Baker-winning Boston University center Macklin Celebrini, a legitimate A-level prospect, but will be defined by its number of high-end defensem*n. Five of the top-10 prospects on my list are D, and I’m higher on each of them than I was on the two defensem*n taken in the top 10 in 2023 (David Reinbacher No. 5 to Montreal and Dmitri Simashev No. 6 to Arizona).

The ranking, now completely customizable and searchable, is also broken down into tiers to give you a better sense of the proximity within groupings and the drop-offs between them. This ranking is divided into five tiers, with a clear top-17 that has emerged for me. They are: 1, 2-3, 4-11, 12-17, and 18-32+. The honorable mentions are sorted alphabetically.

Note that while I consult scouts, coaches, general managers, and team staff, the following evaluations and rankings are strictly my own.

See the rankings here.

Before he would became the fourth freshman to win the Hobey Baker Award as the top player in NCAA, and before he took his talents to famed prep factory Shattuck-St. Mary’s and to the United States Hockey League, Macklin Celebrini played a year of minor hockey with the San Jose Jr. Sharks.

His father, Rick, had taken a job with the NBA’s Golden State Warriors as their director of sports medicine and performance and worked with luminaries of the league such as Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. But with the family of six having relocated from their North Vancouver home to the Bay Area, Macklin and his older brother, Aiden, needed a place to continue their development.

While Aiden played on the Jr. Sharks 15U AAA team, Macklin was on the 14U club and quickly became the featured player as a 13-year-old. He led all players in that age group with 94 points in 54 games, including 49 goals. Over the next four years, Celebrini skyrocketed toward being the top prospect in the sport. A dominant first season at Boston University only presented confirmation.

Widely considered to be No. 1 overall selection when the NHL Draft kicks off June 28 in Las Vegas, the 17-year-old Celebrini is expected to be the prize for the team that wins the draft lottery Tuesday night at the NHL Network studio in Secaucus, N.J. By virtue of their last-place standing, the San Jose Sharks hold the best odds with a 25.5 percent chance that deputy commissioner Bill Daly flips over their placard.

If ever there is a club that needs Macklin Celebration, it’s the Sharks. And it would not only be fitting but also a highly necessary boon to a franchise that’s fallen on the hardest of times.

No matter how Tuesday shakes out, the Sharks will draft no lower than No. 3. And there will still be fine players to choose from at that point. But that’s the backup plan for the war room. The real plan is based on luck, of course, based on the ping-pong balls, but the Sharks would love to have no suspense on draft night and select Celebrini.

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If the Chicago Blackhawks win the NHL Draft Lottery for the second consecutive year, no player may benefit more than Connor Bedard.

Of course, Bedard will be more than fine without the Blackhawks winning the lottery, but imagine what drafting Macklin Celebrini, the consensus No. 1 pick in 2024, would mean for Bedard and the Blackhawks. Chicago general manager Kyle Davidson surely has.

For one, Celebrini would likely become the Blackhawks’ top center. Bedard is probably more gifted offensively, but Celebrini has the makings of the full package. If that’s the case, Celebrini and his line could take on the toughest matchups and free Bedard and his line up for slightly easier competition.

The Blackhawks could also put Bedard and Celebrini on a line together, at least sometimes. The Edmonton Oilers often have Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl centering separate lines, but they’ll bring them together when the situation calls for it.

This probably sounds familiar to Blackhawks fans, too.

“If Chicago gets (Celebrini), it’d be sort of like having the Jonathan Toews to Bedard’s Pat Kane,” said Jack Han, the publisher of “Hockey Tactics” and a hockey consultant. “Not a perfect comparison, but it gives them a lot of flexibility of either playing them together or separately, like 19/88 back in the day. Hard to find a better fit for what Chicago needs, which is a top center who can do everything to free up Bedard.”

Read the full story.

A reminder on how to watch the unveiling, which will presumably once again be Bill Daly flipping over cards. You want to have the original order either memorized or in front of you. When Daly starts flipping, you’re looking for teams to show up in their expected spot. If so, that means they didn’t win, and someone with better odds did.

If a team shows up one (or two) spots early, that means that somebody has jumped ahead of them. But you’ll already know that, because any team that doesn’t show up when you’re expecting them has moved up. That probably means to the top two, although remember that the teams in the 12 through 16 spots can only move up 10 spots.

So if the first few picks go according to plan – Daly flips over logos for the Blues, Wings, Penguins, Wild and Flyers – but then the expected Sabres logo is the Devils instead, that means Buffalo has won one of the two drawings. We won’t know which one until we get to those final two picks, but the Sabres will have one of them. That’s great news if you’re a Buffalo fan, but bad news for all the teams ahead of them in the odds, because it means one of the winning spots is spoken for and teams are being shifted down.

By contrast, if Daly flips over the first card and it’s the Wings instead of the Blues, that means St. Louis has moved up to No. 6. Good for them, bad for some teams, but not the worst news for teams that went in holding one of the top five spots.

Of course, we could get all the way through the lottery without anybody being in the wrong place, which would mean that the Sharks and Hawks have won the drawings, which is the most likely scenario as far as two-team combos go.

One of the most common questions I get asked every year is: How does this NHL Draft compare to recent years? It is my belief that it all starts at the top, focusing on the degree of impact coming from the very first few picks, with an emphasis on the No. 1 pick. So I asked those in the industry to compare this year’s projected No. 1 selection, Macklin Celebrini, a center at Boston University, to the last nine first overall picks.

Six NHL scouts and executives were polled for this list. They were asked to rank the players from the perspective of what they thought of the prospects in their draft years. The last part is key, and hard to control 100 percent given the information we’ve gotten since then on a lot of the players and potential hindsight bias. Six voters were chosen instead of an odd number of five because Celebrini was tied with Jack Hughes after the initial five-voter survey.

See the results.

Two nights before maybe the biggest game of his life, Macklin Celebrini was asked to do one of the very few things he’s not so good at:

Sing.

Celebrini, 17, the expected No. 1 pick in June’s NHL Draft, was at a team dinner with Boston University’s hockey team at the Capital Grille in downtown Minneapolis. The Terriers were playing one of their favorite games, “Shoe Check,” where teammates try to sneak something onto each other’s shoes (butter, etc.) under the table, and if they’re caught when a glass is clinked, they have to sing.

Celebrini, the superstar freshman, and junior Ty Gallagher were this night’s unlucky ones. They stood up and sang “Cruise,” the country hit by Florida Georgia Line.

Typically, the team has its own room of a restaurant when they play Shoe Check. They laugh it off and it stays in-house. But this time, they were in the middle of a packed restaurant, standing out in their red quarter zips.

“It was pretty terrible,” joked Gavin McCarthy. “Probably a little more embarrassing for them.”

“He was a good sport about it,” captain Case McCarthy said.

It’s these moments that Celebrini will likely remember the most about his college days after he joins the NHL. The youngest player in NCAA Division I men’s hockey this season and youngest to win the Hobey Baker Award has garnered nearly Connor Bedard-level hype.

Read more.

Macklin Celebrini won the 2024 Hobey Baker Memorial Award, given to the best player in men's college hockey.

Celebrini, the freshman forward from Boston University, is expected to be the No. 1 pick in this year’s NHL Draft.

Celebrini was a finalist with North Dakota’s Jackson Blake and Boston College’s Cutter Gauthier.

“It’s just surreal, I’m shaking right now,” Celebrini said. “I’m humbled and truly honored.”

This Hobey Baker Memorial Award is the most prestigious individual award in college hockey. Some big-name Hobey Baker winners who recently went on to NHL stardom include Jack Eichel, Cale Makar and Johnny Gaudreau. Celebrini’s next step could be playing for Team Canada for the upcoming World Championships. It’s a possibility he’ll join the team.

The superstar freshman — at age 17 — was a dynamic, two-way player for one of college hockey’s top teams. There’s no doubt a strong case for Gauthier, too, who led the nation with 37 goals. Gauthier’s 65 points were second in college hockey.

Celebrini had 64 points in 37 games, including 32 goals. His Terriers lost in Thursday’s Frozen Four semifinal to Denver in overtime. Celebrini has yet to decide if he’ll go pro after this season but knows it’ll be a busy few months.

“It’ll be a whirlwind,” he said.

Read more.

Rick Celebrini occasionally took his two eldest sons to work with him when they were younger. By then he was an in-demand athletic trainer working with top-flight athletes in Vancouver, his hometown. But the boys’ favorite client was “Uncle Steve.”

“I’d essentially take those two rambunctious boys and it would effectively be their daycare,” Rick recalls. “They’d just wrestle or play soccer or play basketball or play hockey in the gym while Steve and I would do two- or three-hour sessions.”

The boys, Aiden and Macklin, were so young at the time that they don’t have vivid memories of the sessions, but they did learn what it looks like when a superstar athlete is in training.

Uncle Steve, it turns out, was two-time NBA MVP and Basketball Hall of Famer Steve Nash.

And so Aiden and Macklin, whose passion was hockey, went to work. They had no NHL bloodlines in any classical sense, but they used the lessons gleaned from watching Nash and other elite athletes — players such as Steph Curry and Kevin Durant — train with their dad, turning themselves from rambunctious children into NHL prospects. Soon they were sharing the ice with NHL players like goaltender Mike Smith and Canucks center Ryan Kesler.

“Working with Smith and Kesler at the North Shore Winter Club, those are vivid memories,” Macklin recalls. “Being on the ice with two NHL players, they were dealing with their injuries and rehabbing, but it was so special for a young kid to be able to see that. You watch them every night on TV and with Ryan, he played for the hometown team so I idolized him.”

Eventually, others started to notice the Celebrini brothers. Aiden was drafted by the Vancouver Canucks in the sixth round of the 2023 NHL Draft. Macklin, who won’t turn 18 until June 2024, is projected as the No. 1 pick in this year’s NHL Draft.

Read the full story.

The No. 7 seed has only won the lottery once, in the inaugural draft lottery in 1995.

Ironically, the Senators, who have the seventh-best odds this season, had the best odds of winning during the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season by virtue of having the league’s worst record. But when the draft lottery was held, the Los Angeles Kings — who were the No. 7 seed in the rankings — ended up winning. At the time, the rules stated that any club that won the lottery could only move up by four spots. So Ottawa retained the No. 1 selection and drafted Bryan Berard, while the Kings moved up to the No. 3 slot and selected Aki Berg.

Read more about the Senators' lottery chances.

The answer to whether Macklin Celebrini could play in the NHL next season is an easy one: Yes. There’s nothing in his profile that should hold him back, even as a young 18-year-old who would have to play center. I think he could be a good middle-six center tomorrow and would be one of the Calder front-runners.

I wouldn’t say that an immediate jump to the top is a sure bet. Talk began to circulate around him going back to Sweden at the world juniors. It’s my understanding that Hockey Canada has its fingers crossed that he may play for them in Ottawa at next year’s tournament. There are some around college hockey who believe he’s going to come back. As you alluded to, playing with Eiserman doesn’t hurt. It’s also my understanding that he won’t make his decision until after he talks with the team that drafts him about it, though. And there are some who believe he’d be foolish to go back to college for the money (now and into the future) that he’d be giving up.

Read more.

Reader question: If this draft class and last year’s draft were combined, how would you see the top 10 turning out?

Wheeler's answer: Slotting only using where I was at on the 2023 kids pre-draft, and not what’s happened since, the combined ranking of the top prospects from each would probably look something like this:

1. Connor Bedard (’23)
2. Macklin Celebrini (’24)
3. Matvei Michkov (’23)
4. Adam Fantilli (’23)
5. Leo Carlsson (’23)
6. Will Smith (’23)
7. Artyom Levshunov (’24)
8. Ivan Demidov (’24)
9. Cole Eiserman (’24)
10. Zayne Parekh (’24)
11. Sam Dickinson (’24)
12. Zeev Buium (’24)
13. Anton Silayev (’24)
14. Zach Benson (’23)
15. Gabe Perreault (’23)
16. Berkly Catton (’24)
17. Konsta Helenius (’24)
18. Cayden Lindstrom (’24)

At a glance, there’s nothing remarkable about the North Shore Winter Club.

It’s a 65-year-old members-only recreational facility in North Vancouver, housed in a dated, drab, brown brick building and filled with all the sporting amenities you’d expect — swimming pools, tennis courts, ice rinks.

If you’d shown up to watch an unstructured “open-ice” session there about five years ago, though, you would have seen three future top-five NHL draft picks skating, having fun and working diligently on their games.

Macklin Celebrini, roughly 11 years old at the time, would look on in awe as Connor Bedard, a year his senior, shot pucks during those open-ice sessions.

“I’d watch him pretty closely and just pick up the little things,” Celebrini remembers. “We’d be out there on open ice and he’d just score one after the other on a goalie. And the goalie and everyone out there on the ice would just be shaking their heads, ‘How is he doing this?’”

Bedard, of course, was the first pick in the NHL Draft last year. Celebrini is the frontrunner to be selected first in 2024.

“Looking back,” Celebrini says, “I feel like it was important for me to see that stuff.”

Columbus Blue Jackets winger Kent Johnson, who is a few years older than Celebrini and Bedard, was the fifth selection at the 2020 NHL Draft. He was also a regular at those open-ice sessions and remembers being blown away by a 12-year-old Bedard ripping pucks like a veteran NHL sniper.

“I thought then that he had a chance to be the next Connor McDavid,” Johnson says.

Hailing from a city where it rarely snows — Vancouver gets 160 days of rain and only nine days of snow each year on average — Bedard, Celebrini and Johnson are the headliners of a golden age of young hockey talent that emerged from this rain-swept coastal city.

Read the full story.

No discussion of the draft lottery would be complete without a look back to 2020, the year the New York Rangers won and selected Alexis Lafrenière No. 1 overall. It was the pandemic year, in which the NHL granted 24 teams an entry into the playoffs via a “qualifying” round.

Confusion reigned when the lottery winner turned out to be a “placeholder” team – one of the eight teams that would eventually be eliminated in the de facto play-in round, before the traditional 16-team playoff began.

Those eight teams had an equal chance to win the lottery. New York eventually did, which inevitably got the conspiracy theorists going. It’s taken until now for Lafrenière to find his NHL stride, just as it has with player who went No. 2 (the Kings’ Quinton Byfield). And of course, the third player chosen, Tim Stutzle, by Ottawa, has been good almost since the beginning.

If you focus on seasons uninterrupted by the pandemic, the results of the 2017 draft lottery may be the most volatile in NHL history – because in those days, three teams could move up, and in 2017, three teams did.

New Jersey went from No. 5 to No. 1, Philadelphia from No. 13 to No. 2, and Dallas from No. 8 to No. 3.

Consequently, the two teams with the poorest overall records, Colorado and Vancouver, dropped to No. 4 and No. 5, respectively, while the NHL’s newest team, the expansion Vegas Golden Knights, got to pick sixth.

It’s bizarre sometimes how things turn out. Here, the losers ultimately ended up as the winners.

The NHL’s draft lottery will take place tonight, a potentially turning-point moment for one or two franchises, depending upon how the ping-pong balls behave.

The San Jose Sharks have the best odds of winning the lottery, at 25.5 percent. That’s based on an 18.5 percent probability of winning it outright themselves and another seven percent chance that one of the teams that finished 12th to 16th in the standings gets lucky and moves up the maximum number of 10 places. That was one of three significant changes made to the draft lottery format in 2021, when the number of drawings was reduced from three to two and a provision was put in that teams can’t win the lottery more than twice in five years.

That’s essentially the Edmonton Oilers rule. It seemed as if the Oilers won every lottery between 2010 and 2015. The reality is, it was just four times in six years: Taylor Hall in 2010, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins in 2011, Nail Yakupov in 2012 and the biggie, McDavid in 2015.

Few things agitate hockey fans, especially hockey fans in Calgary, more than all that Edmonton lottery luck before the rules changed. Aside from getting to No. 1 in 2015 to draft McDavid, probably Edmonton’s most fortunate moment came in 2014, when they stayed put at No. 3.

Last year, the hockey world went mad when ESPN's Kevin Weekes accidentally announced that Columbus would get the third pick during the draft lottery broadcast before heading to a commercial break. This year, it’s a tweet from ESPN’s John Buccigross that has everyone fired up.

Buccigross tweeted a photo of the NHL Draft Lottery logo in an ESPN studio alongside the NHL draft order with some notable changes (Utah at No. 2!). The broadcaster quickly deleted the tweet and reposted a new one specifying that they were rehearsing and that the real lottery will be held at 5:30 p.m. ET. The broadcast of the draft lottery will still take place at 6:30 p.m. ET.