The 2025 NHL draft prospect pool has been interesting to monitor for the past couple of years. Early favorite James Hagens, who dazzled at last year's Under-18 World Championship tournament and looked to have locked down the top spot, struggled (relatively) at Boston College this season. As such, some of his prospect shine has dulled a bit. Matthew Schaefer, the big, smart and excellent defenseman broke his collarbone early in the World Junior Championship tournament, and the required surgery and recovery period forced him out of the remainder of the hockey season. A pair of teammates on Sweden’s Allsvenskan league team Djurgardens each forced their way into top five consideration by throwing down seasons reminiscent of the best that league has ever seen. Finally, Michael Misa—a former OHL “exceptional status” player and captain of the Saginaw Spirit—played his way into consideration for the top overall draft spot with an tremendous season that included not only player of the year but also the scholastic player of the year awards.
The 2025 NHL draft is also marked by a large tier of similarly valuable players starting around the tenth overall spot and extending throughout the remainder of the first round and beyond. What that means is that once the actual draft gets past the more obvious first few picks, the field will open up quickly and there is a high probability that players ranked in the thirties or forties will be selected in the teens and vice versa.
The Hockey Prophets rankings are, as always, our view of how the ultimate hockey careers of this draft class will resolve themselves over time. It is not a reflection of where we believe the players will be selected, but rather where we would expect them to be if we held a redraft twenty years from now and looked back on their contributions. We do not try to insert players for high-risk/high-reward value to later flaunt our predictive powers if an NHL team selects that player in the top twenty, for example. However, if a player is ranked tenth, it is because we think that when their careers are over, that player will be thought of as the tenth-best player to have come out of the draft class.
A note before the rankings: Matthew Schaefer and Michael Misa are locked into a virtual tie in the Hockey Prophets rankings. Both are elite, standout prospects and both will almost certainly become NHL All-Stars. Normally in a tied situation between and forward and a defenseman, the balance would tip towards the forward. However, because Schaefer has the ability to control a game in all three zones and generate offense, he gets the incredibly slight edge over Misa in the Hockey Prophets rankings. The two players could be considered as 1A and 1A-minus, but are listed here as 1 and 2.
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Matthew Schaefer
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OHL
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Erie Otters
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Embed from Getty Images
Height: 6'2 (188 cm)
Weight: 183 (83 kg)
Age At Draft: 17.8
Points per Game (normalized): 1.29
A/P Score: -3.98 (6th)
Key Strength: Tremendous hockey intelligence, game awareness and skating ability
Key Question: How long will it take him to win his first Norris Trophy as the NHL's top defenseman?
One of the greatest travesties of the 2024-2025 draft prospect season was seeing Matthew Schaefer leave Team Canada at the 2025 IIHF World Junior Championships with a broken collarbone. Not only did Canada lose its best player and a likely chance at a gold medal, but everyone missed out on watching months of play from the most gifted defender (and probably most gifted player overall) in the draft class. Schaefer is also one of the youngest players in the class, with his September 5th birthday beating the cutoff by only nine days. Schaefer plays masterful hockey, the kind that catches the eye of everyone in the rink with the fluidity of his skating, the calm puck management and passing, and the loaded potential energy that can be released at any moment either as an end-to-end rush, a perfect long pass or a crashing slapshot.
Schaefer uses elite four-way agility and smooth skating to cover a lot of ice in just two or three steps, giving him great positional advantages in his own end. With his size and lateral movement, he can strip away space from attacking forwards, preventing them from turning him or beating him to the net front. He keeps the play outside and forces puck carriers to make non-aggressive choices or suffer the consequences, and the consequences of turning the puck over to Schaefer can be harsh.
With his head up and eyes active all the time, Schaefer becomes a truly dominant player when he has the puck in his own end. He has so many ways to break down his opponents and get the puck up ice and into the offensive zone. He looks happy skating the puck out of his own end, and has the stickwork and puckhandling ability of a playmaking forward who can dip and duck and dive his way through traffic and easily win a zone entry. If the forecheckers attack him with aggression and prevent the skating transition, he will draw them in with easy backward skating, then snap a 100-foot pass to an open, streaking forward and then follow his pass up ice. If the breakout needs to be more methodical, he has the patience to slow the tempo, work the puck to his defensive partner and wait for the play to develop.
His vision and awareness are just as remarkable in the offensive zone. At the blue line, with or without the puck, Schaefer can be seen processing the play, making perfect choices on when and where to pass, when to drive down to the net, when to move the puck laterally or rip a shot on net. His offensive skills can be seen in his Age/Production Score which puts him among the best offensive blueliners of the last two decades (nestled in with NHL stars like Evan Bouchard, Victor Hedman and Bowen Byram).
Schaefer is a future Norris Trophy winner and cornerstone foundational blueliner with all of the tools and the hockey intelligence to be a superstar defenseman for the next fifteen years.
Brian’s Favorite In-Game Note: “Absurdly talented. He just carried 200 feet, beat two US players clean, drove the net, scored low along the ice.”
