2026 NHL Draft
Penguins Rebuild: The Five 2026 NHL Draft Prospects to Watch
No Bettors are not bullish on the Pittsburgh Penguins’ chances to be a good team in 2025-26. In fact, bettors place the Penguins’ Stanley Cup chances in line with the San Jose Sharks and Chicago Blackhawks, which is to say there is no chance, but they will take your money anyway.
On most boards, including FanDuel, the Penguins are +41000. In layman’s terms, that’s 410-to-1. If you asked any of the AI programs to run the scenarios by which it’s possible, you’re more likely to get a snarky answer akin to shaking a Magic 8-Ball.
Will the Penguins improve on last season? Concentrate and ask again.
On a recent podcast appearance, Penguins general manager Kyle Dubas brusquely pushed back on any talk of a “tank for McKenna” strategy–a nod to coming phenom Gavin McKenna, who will play at Penn State this season, then almost assuredly the NHL next season–but if and when Dubas trades away his top wingers, the Penguins will be a depleted group.
Such trade talk is becoming its own saga that may conclude with the status quo. However, if we tug on the thread of rebuilding and follow it to its logical conclusion, and if the Penguins are as bad as the betting public believes they will be, that places them in the top five of the deep 2026 NHL Draft
Perhaps it is not too early to look at the 2026 top five projected picks.
Of course, whoever wins the NHL Draft Lottery will select McKenna. That’s an obvious and easy selection that no team will pass up. Penn State head coach Guy Gadowski pumped his own program, but also laid an extreme comparison on McKenna, invoking Wayne Gretzky to describe his playmaking.
Easy, Guy
But that is indicative of how highly hockey people think of McKenna.
Should the Penguins win the draft lottery, we’ll spend days, if not weeks, dissecting his game and projecting him into the Penguins’ lineup. However, if they have a rough year and don’t win the lottery, there is still talent at the top of the draft. Thus far, the major scouting outlets that have released Top 5 rankings are almost uniformly in agreement. To cite our sources, we’re looking at FloHockey, Draft Prospects Hockey, and Daily Face-Off.
Statistically, prospects Nos. 2 through 5 are where the Penguins are most likely to draft (actually, it’s more like Nos. 3 through 7, but we’ll worry about the top 10 as prospects begin their draft-eligible years and more info is available).
Keaton Verhoeff
After McKenna, there is a growing buzz about Canadian-born Keaton Verhoeff, who will play this season at the University of North Dakota. While he will need an extra-thick parka for the coldest spot in the contiguous United States (I spent two weeks there for the 2006 World Juniors, and it hit minus-53 Fahrenheit!), he will benefit from playing at college hockey’s greatest arena and one of the blue blood programs that churns out NHL talent.
Get this, the 6-foot-4, 212-pound defenseman just turned 17 last month. And Verhoeff is right-handed. Scouts are already drooling, and one went so far as to tell College Hockey Insider’s Mike McMahon that Verhoeff is the best right-handed defenseman prospect that he’s ever seen. Verhoeff is even drawing comparisons to Cale Makar.
Perhaps it’s a good thing Ron Hextall isn’t running the Penguins draft next year, eh? (Hextall passed on Makar to select Nolan Patrick with the No. 2 pick in the 2017 Draft.)
Elliotte Friedman recently said that some scouts see McKenna and Verhoeff as 1 and 1A. Perhaps a situation like Alex Ovechkin-Evgeni Malkin in the 2004 NHL Draft is brewing. Or, at worst, a Connor McDavid-Jack Eichel type one-two punch.
Ivar Stenberg
No. 3 is Ivar Stenberg, who can play either wing. Stenberg got a late-season call-up from the Swedish junior league to the Elite League. As a 17-year-old, he did not necessarily set the world ablaze with three points in 25 games (1-2-3), but in the playoffs, the 6-foot, 181-pound got an increased role and upped his game. In the Swedish Elite League playoffs, he had six points, including three goals, in just 12 games.
Stenberg is a lefty, but the Swedes raise their players to be able to play the right wing with a left-handed stick. For Sweden’s U18 team, Stenberg played in 29 games and torched the competition, posting 51 points and scoring 24 goals. Scouts say he has a little grit to his game but is both a playmaker and finisher.
Ryan Roobroeck
No. 4 is Ryan Roobroeck. Nearly all scouting reports on him, including Craig Button of TSN, begin with the words, “Big, strong forward.”
Roobroeck is currently slotted as a center, but he may eventually be destined for the wing. “We’re talking about someone who asserts themselves physically on opponents,” Button said.
Roobroek’s skating is good, as is his physicality. The shot isn’t so bad, either. The forward had applied for exceptional status to play in the OHL in 2022, but the league declined. So, 2023-24 was his first season with the Niagara Ice Dogs, and he posted 51 points with 28 goals in just 63 games. Last season, he took a big step forward with 41 goals and 87 points in 64 games. Our colleague Matt Meagher has already completed a scouting video on Roobroek.
There is a little bit of disagreement at No. 5, but most of the scouting services currently have Viggo Bjorck in that slot. He projects to be a Dubas-type player because he’s a high hockey IQ player, though he is small. Bjorck is just a 5-foot-9, 171-pound right-handed winger, but his junior numbers are solid. While Stenberg had 51 points in 29 games, Bjorck had 18 points, with eight goals in 19 games.
A lot can happen over the next 11 months. Last summer, James Hagens was the presumptive top pick, and he fell to the Boston Bruins at No. 7. Roger McQueen was a top-five pick until a back injury made teams skittish, and he didn’t get to spread his wings in his draft-eligible year, falling to the Anaheim Ducks at No. 10.
And the Penguins face the possibility, if not probability, that a player who wears No. 87 will elevate the team beyond bottom-feeder status, and for the third-straight season, a bad year and a crumbling team looks playoff worthy in March.
Good stuff, Dan. I’ve watched some games this past year with a few of these prospects, and I expect the Pens to be picking somewhere in the 5–10 range. With that in mind, I think Tynan Lawrence will be a name we hear a lot about come next spring. McKenna would be a fantastic get, but I’d be pretty surprised if they actually win the lottery. That said, anything’s possible—it could end up playing out like the 2003–04 draft, where they didn’t win the lottery but still walked away with a Hall of Famer.
5th to 10th spot? Really?
I think they’re probably a 4–7 seed when the dust settles, but that could change depending on trades. They also had some serious luck with injuries last season—most of their big names stayed healthy.
1.) If both Rakell and Rust are traded away I’d be curious to know how many of the other 31 teams in the NHL would be worse on paper going into the 2025-26 season than the Penguins? More than 4?
2.) A separate and arguably more consequential concern for the rebuilding process is whether GMKD, even with a top 5 pick in his pocket would Kindelize his selection by making a “surprise” pick packaged in an impressively articulate rationalization.
Trust the scouts. We can compare Kindel to Eklund and Aicheson 3 to 5 years down the road. Right now, they are all just lottery tickets. Maybe none of them even make the nhl
I think your seeing a shift in NHL prospects, more top 20 players are going to be NHL players – the preparation, training tools, what seems year around now here. Just a matter of what they will become. It will be closer to the NFL. Plus with increase in players jumping to the NCAAs and the AHL going into affect next year. It will make a difference.
With Raks gone probably top 5 easily,
And I hope he doesn’t go outside the box on sure picks…
Espo, as for hoping that GMKD doesn’t go “outside the box” on sure draft picks, it is true that with the exceptions of players like Lemieux and Crosby we won’t know what a “sure pick” is for at least a couple of years and probably more. Nevertheless, after experiencing the Graves signing, the Jarry signing, the Hayes signing, the attempted career salvaging of Glass & Heinen and the choice of a high IQ smallish, slowish, weakish player at #11, I see the emergence of a team building process I’ve described elsewhere as alchemy or more recently as Kindelizing. Let’s revisit… Read more »
I think at best they will be 7th worst in the league with this team.
Ok, Ladies & Gents – alittle trivia – What do Jagr, Bondra, Lang, Gonchar, and Nylander all have in common?
They all played for Washington
Absolutely. (2nd part) There’s a noticeable parallel between that and what the Penguins are dealing with this year.
I will spare you the suspense – a rewind to the 2003–04 season. A lot of those guys were having solid years for the Caps, who ended up trading several pieces during the year. They had a decent roster, started out like dog crap in 2003, and basically those guys were casualties in the bigger picture. Two things really stand out: first, the Pens were the worst team in the league but lost the lottery and picking 2nd. Meanwhile, the Caps—who finished 3rd from the bottom—won the lottery and landed Ovi. No real complaints though… we still got 71. The… Read more »
5th pick in the draft?
That group actually contributed or lack of contibutions, led them getting into the position of winning the lottery.
Everyone, including me, wants McKenna. But Verhoeff would still be an incredible consolation prize. Could be the next superstar forward and defenseman…
Small correction. Hagens went 7th. McQueen was 10th.
Dan, I grew up sixty miles west of Grand Forks and was also at the “2005” world juniors. It was bitterly cold during the tournament. Also, I remember that a blizzard kept deliveries from being made and with all of the Canadians attending, Grand Forks ran out of beer!
thx for this. Since nothing is happening, it’s “skittish” not “skiddish.”
Good god, that was not my best paragraph. Both players one spot ahead of where they went and those little words always get me. I just have no idea how to spell any of those Scottish slang turned real words
And I still love to see ages on these prospects, just to give a bit of perspective on when they might arrive in the NHL.