St. Louis Blues Draft Recap 2025

St. Louis Blues Draft Recap 2025

So, the St. Louis Blues are up and this is going to be real fast because they only made three draft picks and one of them was in the top 20 and the other two were over 130 picks later. Justin Carbono was their first pick and they picked him at 19th overall and I respect it. This is right around where I had Carbono ranked. I think this is about as boomer as it gets. If you want to bet on offensive firepower and raw output, Carbon is a pretty good bet. There’s skill. There’s a wicked shooting ability here. Very strong under pressure as well. So, there’s plenty to like in this game, but I just feel like Carbono is a big big risk bet on upside. Yeah, I do think that there’s skill, but the defensive ability for a winger and just the willingness to chip in in his own end is pretty lackluster in the games that I’ve seen. He’s a player who in my tracked data lines up perfectly with my interpretation of him. Some of the numbers, especially once the puck is in the offensive zone, off the charts good. huge huge pass volumes to the slot, but not a whole lot of direction and planning behind those passes. He can shoot the puck with the best of them, but he shoots from everywhere. And to me, that’s always a risk to take on an offensive player, especially one coming out of Quebec. He’s going back to Blandville this year. I would expect him with a guy like Bill Zan on his line to score a ton. And I would expect a guy like Xavier Vilnov to benefit from that as well going into his draft year. If all goes well, Justin Carbonel might be one of the 10 15 most productive players in this year’s draft. And to get that in the top 20, perfectly reasonable to me. At 147th, they drafted Miky Fiorov. And I thought that he was an intriguing player last year, and I just didn’t see a whole lot of growth in his game this season. He’s a skilled player. He plays at a pretty high pace with play, but he is dynamic in the sense of he can cross defenseman up, stop up, make new angles, all those little things that you really want to see out of offensive players. I just felt that for his age and the real offensive output and consistency of that output over the games that I saw this year wasn’t enough to move the needle for me to put him on the list. But similar to Carbono, I see the skill upside here. I see the potential and the draw of a guy like Fodorov. You leave him in Russia and at the end of the day, I think there could be an interesting skilled player here. He might be an interesting one to watch in the KHL for the time being with an NHL career a little bit unclear. And closing out their draft, they took Loe Harentom, a goalender out of Sweden. Hentom came into the season with a lot of fanfare after a pretty successful season at the under 20 level last year. And this season, I mean, things could have been a lot better for Haren. To me, this is a draft pick that you’re betting on pedigree and recapturing the things that put him in the J20 league last season as a 16-year-old goalender. I saw Haren Stum a couple of times this year and I saw some decent athleticism out of him. There’s a nice little technical ability here that I think carries forward pretty well. Shalfty is junior team in front of him at least for the first few months of the year were abysmal and just not really helping him out very much. So he was doing what he could. The numbers weren’t great, but I felt like people might have been overcorrecting a little bit. Now, when Harnto went to the under8s, that’s when there were a bit of issues that I think led him to be a pick this late. He was bad in the gold medal game against Canada. And the numbers in that game did not lend itself to a seven nothing win for Canada. And I would say some of the goals that went in on Haren Stom and he ended up getting pulled were definitely ones you need him to save, especially in a gold medal game. And if there is any shred of a doubt that a potentially high-value goalender crumbles under pressure, it’s going to affect their draft stock. Now, I’m not saying that that’s a guaranteed thing with Harn’s style of play, but this is a guy who’s not necessarily the biggest goaler around. Has not really turned the corner and generated some really good save production numbers. Maybe there’s something here that he can capture and move forward with. He’ll be going to the second pro division next year, playing for Sotalia in Sweden. I imagine he will play some games at the men’s level next year and you’ll get a much better look at what’s going on there. There is also an argument to be made that the pressure of being a player to be drafted in the NHL and talked about when you’re 15, 16 years old, especially as a goalender, it might get into your head a little bit. And now that it’s over, now that he’s on a team that to their credit has drafted some good goalenders over the years, maybe there’s something you can dig through with Harren Stom. I mean, at this point, I had honestly forgotten that Hornstrom had not been drafted. So, seeing his name get drafted, I’m pleasantly surprised. I like to see this bet. We’ll see where it goes with St. Louis, but if it works out, it could work out really, really well. So, for St. Louis, they’re getting a 1D. St. Louis did go up there and take risky bets, especially with Carbono in the top 20. There could be an offensive player there that comes with some downsides, but through it all is very productive, and there’s value in that. But there is a level of risk in his style of play projecting to the NHL. In my view, I think it could work, but we’ll have to see what the overall results look like. Fodorov, I didn’t see an NHL level skilled player there, but there were ingredients that might lead him there. And Hentom, again, there’s not a real huge amount of like risk you can take once you get to 179th in the NHL draft. It’s an interesting bet to make on a goalender who did not have a particularly amazing season this year. If he turns out to be anything from here and he recaptures some of that magic from previous seasons, then you’ve done a great job here. Considering the draft volume they had, they aimed really high. Do I think they’re all going to get there? Probably not. But if they do, then yes, this could be a really good draft class, even though they only drafted three times and once in the top 20 and the rest came in the middle to late rounds of the draft. And with that, we’re going to call it. 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The St. Louis Blues made some big moves at the 2025 NHL Draft — and in this video, Will Scouch goes through each of their picks and shares his thoughts on the players they selected. From first-rounders to late-round swings, Will breaks down what stood out, what might work, and what could be questioned.

At the end, he gives his overall thoughts and a final grade on the Blues’ 2025 draft class.

#NHLDraft #Blues #Scouching #HockeyProspects #StLouisBlues

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