2024 Edmonton Oilers prospects:
Preview / depth hopefuls #26-33
The August long weekend has come and gone, which can only mean the time has come for the Cult of Hockey‘s annual prospects rankings.
This series has been an annual feature of this blog since 2011. For the first several of those years, the players at or near the top of the this list also ranked very near the top of the list of most important Oilers anywhere in the system. Consider that the #1 ranked players in 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2015 were Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Darnell Nurse, Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid respectively. All these years later, all four still rank among the most important Oilers: each is a lettered member of the leadership group and the bearer of an eight-year contract worth tens of millions of dollars.
With the core of the big team firmly in the present, the prospect pool has reverted to a secondary though still-important role as a pipeline of future, still-developing talent. It’s been a few years now since a teenager has made the jump directly to the NHL and that is no longer a realistic expectation. The big club is deeper, and its draft picks significantly lower in the pecking order when they aren’t traded away for immediate help.
A year ago we emphasized in both the introductory post and the series wrap that the number of prospects in the system had reached a low point. Just 27 players met our definition of “prospects”, namely developing players signed to NHL-class contracts (the 50-man list) or on the club’s reserve list of drafted-but-unsigned players, while excluding those signed to AHL deals. Our rule of thumb has always been that said players remain eligible for the Calder Trophy, though with a tiny bit of wiggle room that we’ll explore in a moment.
The good news is that the Oilers have replenished their pool of prospects significantly over the past 12 months, rebounding from an all-time (?) low of just 27 such in 2023 back to a more normal 33 in the summer of 2024.
One reason for that is that there were few graduations this time around. One year after top-three hopefuls Philip Broberg, Dylan Holloway and Stuart Skinner along with since-departed Vincent Desharnais and Markus Niemelainen all were credited with making the jump to the bigs, just one player did so in 2023-24, and that was a marginal case. Utility forward James Hamblin started and finished the year in the AHL, but his 31-game NHL stint as an injury replacement burned off his Calder eligibility.
Worth noting that all six of the guys named in the prior paragraph took at least two if not three years to make the transition, and not all did so successfully. Gone are the years where the likes of McDavid, Draisaitl and Nugent-Hopkins made the jump straight from the Draft to the Show as teenagers. Fact is that the youngest Oiler to play a game during the Ken Holland era was Broberg, who was 20 years, 148 days when he made his NHL debut.
Hamblin was one of eight prospects who have been de-listed since a year ago, and one of just two who remain in the system; now 26-year-old rearguard Ben Gleason is the other. Of the rest, three were traded including last year’s top prospect Xavier Bourgault, two weren’t renewed, and the club allowed their rights to one player expire without signing him.
The other 19 players with white backgrounds remain current prospects. Where will they be rated in 2024? Stay tuned.
The rights to 14 other players have been acquired in the last twelve months. One pleasant change was the infusion of a full complement of seven fresh draftees; another was the club’s moderately aggressive pursuit of trades and entry level free agent signings. In chronological order:
If nothing else, the prospect pool as a whole got a major lift in the last few weeks, starting with the draft floor trade that landed Sam O’Reilly and subsequent trades that landed Matt Savoie and Roby Jarventie. In the words of Jeff Jackson on Draft Day, “we have to get our pipeline going”. The most recent additions have shaken up the top of this year’s rankings.
In one special case, prior prospect Noah Philp re-signed with the Oilers after a year away from the game. Already considered a late bloomer before the unscheduled season off, he’s technically no longer Calder-eligible since he will turn 26 just a couple of weeks before the Sep 15 deadline. However, in every other sense he remains a prospect and one of the more interesting ones in the system, so we collectively took the decision to include him as an exceptional case.
So let’s move on to this year’s rankings, the cumulative output of a panel of voters which for years has included the Cult of Hockey’s homegrown trio of David Staples, Bruce McCurdy and Kurt Leavins, and our Edmonton Journal colleague and long-time Oilers scribe Jim Matheson. Last year we invited friend-of-the-blog Ira “Original Pouzar” Cooper to participate. A close follower of Edmonton’s prospects, especially those in the AHL, Ira will chip in with a few profiles a little later in the series.
As per tradition we’ll start our countdown at the bottom, providing brief summaries of long shot prospects before delivering individual feature posts for the top 15. Today, though, we start at the other end of the list with the bottom eight prospects, the longest of long shots.
Prospects #26-33
#33 G Ty Taylor (new to list), age 25, 6’4, 201 lbs, undrafted, acquired by trade.
His rights came from Tampa Bay as part of the complicated three-way deal that also landed forwards Adam Henrique and Sam Carrick from Anaheim at the deadline. Usually such throw-ins to trades are to balance out numbers of contracts (remember Zach Pochiro?), but in Taylor’s specific case, there is no contract. He simply got moved from Tampa’s reserve list to Edmonton’s, for reasons that weren’t/aren’t entirely clear. I can’t recall anyone associated with the Oilers even mentioning his name at the time he was acquired. The ultimate afterthought.
He’s barely played any hockey, just 70 GP in his last 6 seasons. Lightly used in three years with University of New Hampshire, Taylor has bounced around since: from Grant MacEwan University in USports to Glasgow Clan of the UK’s EIHL to a stint this past season with Evansville Thunderbolts of the SPHL (formerly Southern Professional Hockey League), where he played 18 games with respectable numbers (.913, 2.69) . Based in North Carolina, that league ranks somewhere between the ECHL and the Federal League on the pro hockey hierarchy; indeed, only one player (goaltender Scott Darling) has ever played in both the SPHL and NHL. It’s unclear when the Oilers’ rights to the player might expire, but it seems unlikely it will matter.
#32 C Maxim Denezhkin(last year #26), age 23, 5’10, 165 lbs., drafted #193 in 2019.
The smallish pivot played 26 games in 2023-24, split between the top two Russian leagues with no obvious promotion from one to the other. His game logs from both loops indicate an extended absence from early February to early April. He mustered just 1-3-4 in 16 games with Avtomobilist Yekaterinburg of the KHL before collecting a respectable 2-1-3 in 4 playoff games, averaging about 13 minutes a game along the way. He remains a draft-and-follow, though at a great distance. Slated to remain with Avtomobilist in 2024-25.
#31 C Carl Berglund(last year #21), age 24, 6’2, 207 lbs., signed as an undrafted free agent in 2023.
Signed after his senior year in UMass-Lowell, the Swedish pivot split his first pro season about 80/20 between the Oilers ECHL affiliate in Fort Wayne (51 GP, 12-30-42) and Bakersfield of the AHL (12 GP, 1-3-4). Still has a year to run on his two-year entry-level deal, and while his numbers with the Komets were respectable, he’s starting from a long way back. He’ll do well to establish himself as a full-time AHLer in the season to come.
#30 C Tomas Mazura (last year #25), age 23, 6’4, 205 lbs., drafted #162 in 2019.
The strapping pivot actually got in a full season of NCAA puck with St. Lawrence University where as a junior he had a “breakout year” with offensive totals of 6-14-20 in 34 GP, good enough to tie for second in team scoring. He remains lightly-experienced, averaging under 20 games a season over the past eight years, half of them in prep school. He’ll need a true breakout year as a senior to draw a contract offer from the Oilers.
#29 G Samuel Jonsson (last year #22), age 20, 6’5, 201 lbs., drafted #158 in 2022.
Jonsson turned 20 last December, therefore graduated from the junior ranks (where he played 27 games the year prior) and turned pro. He was lightly used in the Swedish second and third divisions, playing 8 games in all with a combined .861 save percentage. Not much sign of progress. He’s slated to play with BIK Karlskoga in HockeyAllsvenskan (second division) in 2024-25, though he may well bounce around some more. Oilers have two more seasons before needing to reach a decision.
#28 CJoel Määttä (last year #20), age 22, 6’2, 201 lbs, drafted #222 in 2022.
Already 20 when the Oilers took a seventh-round flyer on him in 2022, Määttä has since played his sophomore and junior seasons at University of Vermont. A defensive centre, he scored just 4-5-9 in 26 games in 2023-24, and overall has mustered 29 points and -20 in 94 NCAA games. The big Finn has some nice attributes, but the absence of offence suggests an NHL future is highly unlikely. He has one more year to prove himself worthy of a contract offer, be it from the Oilers or another club in whatever league.
#27 G Nathan Day (last year #24), age 19, 6’2, 181 lbs., drafted #184 in 2023.
Another goaltender selected with a late-round flyer, Day emerged as the #1 stopper with the OHL’s Flint Firebirds, where his game played surged from 32 to 54. His results stayed relatively flat, however; his save percentage actually declined from .874 in his draft year to .868 in Draft +1. He’ll need to raise that bar significantly in the season to come in order to receive contract interest from the Oilers by the 2025 Jun 01 deadline.
#26 D Bauer Berry (new to list), age 18, 6’4, 198 lbs., drafted #218 in 2024.
After an extended series of prospects #’s 27-32 who have been bounced from the depths of last year’s rankings to the depths of this year’s, Bauer represents a new addition. That said his draft pedigree (seventh round prayer) is not dissimilar from many/most of the others featured here. The Oilers have made some decent picks of superficially similar players at the tail end of recent drafts, including Desharnais and a couple of guys much higher on this year’s list in Philip Kemp and Maximus Wanner. Like those three seventh-round picks, Bauer is a big, defence-first rearguard. He didn’t get drafted for his offence, just 1 goal and 14 points in 59 USHL games with Muskegon Lumberjacks in 2023-24. Perhaps the stat of most interest is the 83 PIM he garnered as a “suffocating defender with a physical style” in the USA’s top junior league. He is projected to play one more year in Muskegon before joining University of St. Thomas in the NCAA in 2025-26, and can safely be projected as a looong way from the NHL. Draft and college.
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