Puck Preps Rankings & Ratings Explained

Puck Preps is the industry's most comprehensive and unbiased prospect ranking platform and is also used to generate Puck Preps Junior and NCAA Team Drafting and Recruiting Rankings.

The goal of Puck Preps is to accurately project and predict success of a player at the Junior and College level. To be clear, we are not projecting how a player will perform at the professional level as that is of little importance to what we are trying to accomplish.

 

Star Rating Tiers Explained

 

Five Star Exceptional Talent (100-105)
Franchise-type players that we do not see come along very often and are not in every class. These are the special prospects who separate themselves from even the best of the best of their age group. Commonly we see this tier receiving accolades like “Exceptional Status” into the CHL.

Five Star (90-99)
Prospects at the top of their class with 1st round potential come their NHL Draft year.  These are the future and current stars of junior and college hockey that everybody should be watching.

Four Star (70-89)
High caliber prospects that are top 150 among their class. The players that fill the first lines and top pairings of their respective programs. The number of four star athletes in our final rankings will be approximately 100.

Three Star (50-69)
A majority of Junior and NCAA rosters will be made up of players in the three star range. They are likely to play prominent roles for their respective Junior/NCAA teams with possible NHL upside.

 

Evaluation and Ranking Process/Priorities

We utilize a number of resources to help evaluate and rank players including video and in person viewings. Anyone who has a written evaluation on Puck Preps has been viewed a minimum of five times and in a vast majority of cases many more especially at the older age levels. Due to the wide variances in youth hockey including quality of leagues, competition, exposure and physical developmental, we consider regions that typically produce the most Junior/College players as well as positional importance related to draft value when ranking players.

 

Rankings Process

One of the things that makes Puck Preps unique is that we consider our rankings to be fluid in that we do not adhere to strict monthly or quarterly timelines to update and make changes. Due to the nature of youth hockey and the ages in consideration, our rankings are constantly being evaluated and updated as we have increased viewings of players or first-time viewings of players we may not have previously seen. This is particularly true in the younger age groups where viewings are more limited, and players are at much different stages in their physical development.

We utilize a number of viewing opportunities to evaluate players but are primary focuses include:

• Regular season games
• High profile in-season tournaments
• Post-season games
• High profile spring tournaments
• Spring camps
• National team development camps
• All-star events and combines
• Summer Camps

We have established a strong team of regional scouts who all contribute to our player rankings and evaluations.

Joel Henderson - Director of Scouting
Brayden Olafson – Regional Scout
Chase Allen – Regional Scout
Alex Annun – Regional Scout
Jordan Malette – Regional Scout
Sam McGilligan - Regional Scout
Keenan McEwan - Regional Scout

We are always looking to grow our team so if you are interested in becoming a scout for Puck Preps please contact us at info@puckpreps.com.