Leafs Prospect Update – November 16th

In case you were unaware, The University of Minnesota System has two NCAA Division 1 hockey programs. 

The University of Minnesota Golden Gophers, who play for the school’s flagship campus in Minneapolis and St. Paul, are a very good hockey team. In fact, they were the top-ranked team in all of the NCAA heading into this weekend’s home-and-home with their cross-campus rivals, the University of Minnesota-Duluth Bulldogs. You’ve probably guessed that the Bulldogs represent the University of Minnesota-Duluth campus, and you probably already know that Leafs prospects Dominic Toninato and Tony Cameranesi play for UMD.

However, you probably didn’t expect the No. 13 Bulldogs to sweep the No. 1 Gophers, who will probably definitely not be No. 1 much longer.

Toninato would score a goal in both of UMD’s 3-0 and 2-1 win. His nine goals on the season are tied for the lead in NCHC goal scoring, and his 13 points in 12 games place him 4th in league scoring. 

Cameranesi’s two assist over the weekend pushed his stat line to eight points in 12 games.

You can watch the highlights from Saturday’s 2-1 Bulldogs win here. I didn’t embed the video because it has AutoPlay and AutoPlay is quite literally the devil.

William Nylander is 19th in SHL scoring with 14 points. Those are pretty ho-hum numbers, until you realize that Nylander has only played in 10 games so far this season, which is about half of what everyone else on the SHL leaderboards has played. 

Nylander isn’t picking up meaningless points to pad his numbers either. Besides five goals, eight of Nylander’s nine assists are primary assists. His 1.4 points-per-game average is the best in the league. 

Just as impressive considering he’s still, you know, 18 years old, is that Nylander’s 19:58 TOI/G average is third amongst all SHL forwards.

Here’s a video of Nylander’s goal and assist from Saturday’s 5-4 loss to Leksands IF, for your viewing pleasure.

I guess you can say they’re trending upward? The Leafs have jumped from 20th to 19th in HockeysFuture.com’s Fall Team Rankings, which seems fair I guess. 

The Leafs simply don’t have a strong prospect pool, mostly due to the fact that the team has traded away a whole lot of picks in the past decade. It’s also because the Leafs have made ‘safe’ picks in recent years, but mostly due to that first thing (come at me, bruh).

HF has named Nylander as Toronto’s top prospect, which is correct, and rounds out the top five with Josh Leivo, Matt Finn, Frederik Gauthier and Stuart Percy. I would say that list is pretty ok, except that you should probably now swap Percy with Finn and maybe fire Gauthier from a cannon and into the sun (or at the very least outside of the top ten).

They haven’t posted the rest of their Leafs list yet, but I imagine Andreas Johnson should rank pretty high, along with Connor Brown, Greg McKegg, Rinat Valiev, the aforementioned Dominic Toninato and maybe even Dakota Joshua – all of whom are off to good starts this season.