And just like that, we’re all wrapped up with the first round of selections on our 2025 Community Draft Board. We’re going to keep on rolling into the second round over these next few weeks here, as we familiarize ourselves with some more players who might be in play for the Flyers’ four picks in that round, but before we dive in there, why don’t we take a moment to orient ourselves with our own position in this ranking.
| 1 | Matthew Schaefer | 17 | Malcolm Spence |
| 2 | Michael Misa | 18 | Cole Reschny |
| 3 | James Hagens | 19 | Cullen Potter |
| 4 | Anton Frondell | 20 | Ben Kindel |
| 5 | Porter Martone | 21 | Logan Hensler |
| 6 | Caleb Desnoyers | 22 | Braeden Cootes |
| 7 | Victor Eklund | 23 | Ivan Ryabkin |
| 8 | Roger McQueen | 24 | Blake Fiddler |
| 9 | Jake O’Brien | 25 | Cameron Schmidt |
| 10 | Radim Mrtka | 26 | Sascha Boumedienne |
| 11 | Jackson Smith | 27 | Cameron Reid |
| 12 | Carter Bear | 28 | Bill Zonnon |
| 13 | Brady Martin | 29 | Joshua Ravensbergen |
| 14 | Lynden Lakovic | 30 | Jack Murtagh |
| 15 | Kashawn Aitcheson | 31 | Milton Gastrin |
| 16 | Justin Carbonneau | 32 | Jakob Ihs-Wozniak |
Here we have the complete Draft Board order up to this point — with links to any profiles you might have missed — a complete order which feels, in many ways, a good mixed representation of many of the mocks and rankings that have been coming out elsewhere (great job, gang).
And what can we take from all of this? We have some notes.
Bits and bobs
Heavy on the forwards
Perhaps most notable about this first-round pool is the sparseness of the defense group. Of these top-32 players in our ranking, just eight of them are defensemen (and effectively, as the Flyers focusers, we’re looking at more like seven, with Schaefer coming off the board immediately with that first pick). This certainly makes things a little more complicated for the Flyers who, while they do have a reasonably good raw volume of defensemen in their prospect pool, are still looking to add some high-end talent to that mix. And given the larger pocket of defensemen is hanging out around the middle of the round, it’s so far looking like the more interesting names in that group could be out of the Flyers’ reach with their late-round picks.
But will we see some of these players ultimately fall back into the Flyers’ range, or will they get creative and package some picks in order to move up into the middle of the round to target someone at the top of that group? Time will tell.
A goalie breaks in
Also notably, we had a goaltender break in at the tail end of the end of the round, with Joshua Ravensbergen coming in at the 29th spot. And this will be an interesting situation to watch unfold — the rankings for him are a bit all over the place, and it is somewhat rare to see a goaltender selected in the first round, so while we as the overlords of this project aren’t exactly putting money of him sneaking into the real first round, we can’t deny that there are a lot of rankings out there that like him, and the possibility of it happening does remain open.
How things change…
It’s also been neat to see how the public rankings are already shifting, and who the notable risers and fallers are. After all, we did kick this series off before the conclusion of the U18 tournament, and that has made for some catapulting of stocks around here — we’re looking specifically at Brady Martin, who clocked in at 13 on our list, which felt reasonable at the time, but now he’s seen a huge boost from his performance at that tournament, and now we’re seeing him mocked inside the top-7 on a number of lists. That’s probably the most notable mover, but we’ve also seen some movement with regards to Caleb Desnoyers, where some before might have through him in the sixth spot to the Flyers was a bit of a reach, now he’s gaining ground and even in some mocks finding himself off the board entirely by the time the Flyers’ pick at six rolls around. Equally, one wonders if Roger McQueen might see his stock rising again coming up, now that some clarity has been given on his injury situation.
This is all to say that we’re getting a good reminder already of how slippery this projection business can get, and while we see some legitimate late movement happening in the rankings, there’s also a bit of telephone game-style spinning out of movement that can happen in online discussions, and it’s all a bit tough to parse out until the picks are officially made. But it’s fun to dig into, all the same.
With just over three weeks remaining before the draft, we’ll keep this thing moving, and check back in to see how much weirder and wilder it’s all gotten by the time it’s just about all said and done.