The 2020 Top 25 Under 25 wraps up* for this year with the official list or our 25 players.

* Expect us to revisit this after the draft and free agency sometime in November or December.

The Official List

  1. Auston Matthews 1.00
  2. Mitch Marner 2.42
  3. William Nylander 2.58
  4. Rasmus Sandin 4.58
  5. Nicholas Robertson 4.83
  6. Kasperi Kapanen 5.58
  7. Timothy Liljegren 7.25
  8. Travis Dermott 8.17
  9. Pierre Engvall 10.25
  10. 2020 2nd-round pick 12.00
  11. Adam Brooks and Mikko Kokkonen 12.50
  13. Nicholas Abruzzese 13.50
  14. Mikhail Abramov 13.75
  15. Semyon Der-Arguchintsev 14.25
  16. Denis Malgin 14.33
  17. Egor Korshkov 16.42
  18. Pontus Holmberg 20.08
  19. Joseph Duszak 20.25
  20. Filip Kral 20.92
  21. Jeremy Bracco 21.33
  22. Mac Hollowell 21.58
  23. 2020 Toronto 4th-round pick 23.08
  24. Jesper Lindgren 23.67
  25. 2020 Vegas 4th-round pick 24.33

Looking at the list and ignoring the average rankins, it’s easy to forget that Brooks and Kokkonen weren’t the only pair of players ranked virtually the same. They were just the only pair in the top 25 with completely identical vote points.

By assigning points to each vote of 25 for a first place, 24 for a second and so on to one for a 25th, and zero for anything not ranked, the sum of all the points ranked the list from top to  bottom. With 12 voters, a perfect score is 300. This is how we handed out the points:

Auston Matthews, unsurprisingly came in with a perfect score for the fifth year in a row. And the draft pick that squeaked in on the bottom of the list had 20 points. Joseph Woll and Ian Scott — tied for 26th — had 18 each and Kristians Rubins and Michael Koster, tied for 28th had 12 each, so you can see that they plus the two picks and Lindgren make up a tier of players that straddle the line between on and off the list.

The group from Mac Hollowell up to Pontus Holmberg are another tier very nearly tied in points. Egor Korshkov is a question mark. Is he in with those “firmly at the bottom of the list”  players or is he up with the middle tier? Our voters were split on that.

The middle tier is a very clearly demarcated set of players barely separated by only a few rankings points. From Denis Malgin, the last player to not be ranked by all 12 voters, up through the second-round pick, the total spread in points is only 28. We don’t have strongly held opinions on this group.

Like Korshkov, Pierre Engvall sits in a limbo between two tiers. He’s almost in with that middle group, but he almost in the “not Matthews” group as well.

The top tier has three steps. Dermott and Liljegren step up to Kapanen, Robertson and Sandin, who step up to our nearly unanimous second and third choices of Nylander and Marner.

The gap between Matthews and Marner is almost a ranking and half or 17 points spread over 12 voters. The largest step is between Nylander and Sandin, however, so we all clearly think the top three are well above the rest. One of the most interesting things to look forward to in this exercise, is what happens next year with Nylander gone and Robertson and Sandin doing whatever it is they end up doing between now and then.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the official voters list and how we all behaved in the ballot box this year.

Top 25 Under 25