2024 Montreal Canadiens Top 25 Under 25: Community Vote

Each summer since 2010, Eyes On The Prize has been profiling the top young players in the Montreal Canadiens organization, ranking them in our Top 25 Under 25. In the 2023 version of the rankings last summer, we had a record 54 players and prospects to consider. This year, that number remains the same after another 10 prospects were selected in the 2024 NHL Draft.

That was more than we were expecting given Kent Hughes’s history of acquiring NHL talent at the draft for some of his picks. He himself said he was expecting to be active with his draft capital, and is still rumoured to be interested in a couple of forwards on the trade market, so we begin this year’s project with the possibility that things could change between now and the end of the countdown in September.

Despite the lack of a trade, there was some high-end talent added to the organization. A trade was made to trade up to 21st and select Michael Hage, and the fifth overall selection was used to select arguably the second-best player of the entire class, Ivan Demidov.

As ever, we determine eligibility based on the same cutoff date used for the NHL draft, so every player on the list was born after September 15, 1999. The players are separated below by position and sorted in descending order by age.

With a spectrum ranging from newly drafted teenagers to players who have seen multiple years of action in the NHL, some guidelines for the project are needed. The best way to approach the ranking is to consider the projected value of the players.

Many people preferred the “would you trade Player A for Player B?” method of weighing the options in the past. One issue with this particular method is that you may end up placing more importance on current NHL players than top-end prospects.

The goal of the project is to rank players according to their projected impact at the NHL level. This does not necessarily mean with the Montreal Canadiens, and not necessarily for this upcoming season. Assume every player has an open shot at claiming the place in a lineup that their skill set suggests.

On the flip side, a player already producing in a third-line role in the NHL is likely more valuable than a longer-term prospect who has a small chance of becoming a top-six player. Your decision in those situations will depend on how confident you are that a prospect will reach his projected ceiling.

With that in mind, instead of asking which player you would rather trade, ask which player you’d rather lose. If you would be more upset at the organization parting with a certain prospect than a particular established NHL player, the prospect should be higher on your list. The player at the bottom of your ballot should be the one the organization (and you) would miss the least if he left. The player at the top will be the one you’d happily rebuild your franchise around from scratch, whether that’s a current top-six NHL forward, a minor-league goaltender, or a teenage defenceman.

Any obvious troll ballots (e.g. placing a current NHL player at #54) will be disqualified. The hundreds of community votes we receive will be averaged together to serve as one of our panel entries — a wisdom-of-the-crowd ranking — that we incorporate in the final results.

Two active EOTP community members will be granted individual ballots. Candidates will be limited to those with no violations of our community guidelines on their account in the past year, and who hadn’t had an individual vote in the series in the past four years. The two representatives will be contacted for the chance to have their ballots receive equal weight to those of staff members in determining the rankings.

Should you decide to do some research for your ballot, you can read up on Hadi Kalakeche’s Catching The Torch and Across The Border series, Patrik Bexell’s European Prospect Report, and our comprehensive coverage of the 2024 NHL Entry Draft. I ask that you refrain from discussing the specific or relative order of the players in the comments of this article as to not influence other members’ decisions.