Ben Kindel looks like he’s about to join an elite club of players who make the NHL debut in the same regular season as the year they were drafted.
To make matters even more impressive, the lion share of the impact of draft+1 NHLers tends to be at the very top of the draft in the first few picks. Last year in 2024-25, five players drafted in 2024 played in the NHL for a combined total of 95 games. First overall pick Macklin Celebrini made up the majority of that sample just by himself (70 games). Add in second overall pick Artyom Levshunov and that’s 88 of the 95 games right there.
In some ways, Kindel’s season is closest to center Jett Luchanko of the Flyers, who somewhat surprisingly appeared in four early season games last season before being sent back to juniors. Luchanko did that from the 13th overall draft slot, Montreal’s Ivan Demidov (two games, 5th overall) and Calgary’s Zayne Parekh (one game, 9th overall) were the other draft+1 players. Minnesota’s Zeev Buium (12th overall) did make his debut in the playoffs for a single game.
Eliminating the very elite of top-5 picks, since they don’t closely parallel to Kindel, here are some other recent NHL forwards in their draft+1
Going back further for the Penguins, Daniel Sprong (drafted 46th overall in 2015-16) played in 18 NHL games in 2015-16. Jordan Staal (2nd overall), Sidney Crosby (1st overall) and Marc-Andre Fleury (1st overall) wouldn’t meet our draft criteria but are other recent 18-year old Pens over the years. One player you might think qualifies, Olli Maatta, doesn’t. Maatta made the team out of training camp for the 2013-14 season, after he had turned the ripe age of 19 a few months earlier in August.
Time will tell how this goes for Kindel to join this list, players like Zach Benson and Cole Sillinger have managed to stick in the NHL for the whole season, but consider those are two cases out of hundreds of forwards drafted in the last five years outside of the top-5 who have been able to accomplish that. Kindel’s immediate NHL future could play out more closely to Jett Luchanko or William Eklund where the debut is made but the first year of the contract is not burned away by playing 10+ NHL games.
Then again, Kindel has done nothing but exceed all expectations at every turn this fall, so who knows. It wouldn’t be completely unprecedented for him to continue on that path. Making the NHL in draft+1 as a forward without being a top-5 pick is already in very rare territory. Kindel will join the four other true players who have earned a spot on an NHL roster via training camp in the last five years of Benson, Sillinger, Luchanko and Eklund.
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