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.

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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.

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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 Gus Gadowski pumped his own program, but also laid an extreme comparison on McKenna, invoking Wayne Gretzky to describe his playmaking.

Easy, Gus.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 6. Roger McQueen was a top-five pick until a back injury made teams skiddish, and he didn’t get to spread his wings in his draft-eligible year, falling to the Anaheim Ducks at No. 9.

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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.

The post Penguins Rebuild: The Five 2026 NHL Draft Prospects to Watch appeared first on Pittsburgh Hockey Now.