Here we are, only two days away from the U18 World Championships in Switzerland.

We are looking forward to following the tournament live in both venues and to get answers from several draft prospects that are ranked in our Top 20 for the 2023 NHL Entry Draft.
That obviously doesn’t pertain to the two players at the top of the list, as neither Michkov (late 04-born, and Russian) or Carlsson (late 04-born) can take part at the event.
We talked about our preference for Michkov in the first episode of Jeff Rea’s Amateur Scoutin Europe hockey podcast, check it out!

Speaking of that, the “100 Prospects Blue Dispatch” introduced there will be released after we come back from our trip to the U18 Worlds. On top of our exclusive coverage of what’s coming up for the 2024 and 2025 Entry Drafts in the top four European hockey countries, it will also include an update on the 2023 Top 20 we are publishing here.
Players whose performances in Porrentruy and Basel could easily change the look of our current list are especially those that at the moment we have ranked from #9 to #14. They will be under our close scrutiny in the upcoming live viewings and we are eager to see performances that address some question marks attached to them.

Otto Stenberg (#9) in particular has dropped on our rankings through the season, to the point that right now we wouldn’t feel comfortable in recommending him as a clear 1st round pick.
Ahead of this season we considered Stenberg a competitive player, but in his draft year he has shown a concerning tendency to give up the puck way too easily. We hope to see him fight through challenges to complete the plays he intends to make and to be more successful at that as he goes up against his peers.

Kasper Halttunen (#11) is another player that didn’t have the draft season we were hoping for and who could use a strong tournament to re-establish himself as a top-tier prospect.

Perhaps the player we’re looking forward to watch the most is Czech defenseman Jakub Dvorak (#12). We feel like he is an intriguing prospect and he has played only one game since November because of injuries.

Moving our attention to the bottom of the list, there was a lot of competition for the last spot, which means we have a group of players in the same tier that could easily move up in our ranking. As usual our final list will be a much longer, so all those players will safely appear as draft-worthy prospects there, no matter if they will crack the top 20 or not.

We are obviously going to focus almost exclusively on the 2023 draft class in the next two months, and that includes going back to watch more videos once the season is over.