New York Rangers first round pick possibilities: The forwards

The New York Rangers have two first round picks in the June Entry Draft.  All of the attention has been on the the second overall lottery pick, presumed to be Kaapo Kakko or Jack Hughes.  Who could the Rangers draft with their 20th overall pick?

The New York Rangers acquired the Winnipeg Jets first round pick in the Kevin Hayes trade, the 20th in the first round.   Here are some of the possible targets for the Blueshirts.

It’s pretty much a guarantee that the player the Rangers pick with their 20th selection will need some additional seasoning.  In 2017, they went off the board and selected Filip Chytil, an unexpected selection that turned out to be a good one.

Last June the team had two additional first round selections and picked two defense prospects, K’Andre Miller and Nils Lundkvist. Both players have shown tremendous promise, but are still at least a year or two away from the NHL.

Although the thought is that the Rangers have restocked their prospect pool, they still have a big need for depth at forward.   They have done well with defensemen, but with Vitali Kravtsov making his Rangers debut, they have a lack of prospects.  In fact, Morgan Barron and Riley Hughes are the only non-professional prospects with any kind of NHL upside in the entire organization.

With a need to restock their offensive prospects in the 2019 draft, I will start by taking a look at forwards that could be available when they make that 20th pick.

In selecting the players I drew on the scouting reports from five sources:

1. NHL Central Scouting
2. Craig Button, TSN
3. Corey Pronman, The Athletic
4. Sam Cosentino, Sportsnet
5. Steve Kournianos, The Sporting News

Non-starters

There are ten players who made the top 15 on all five lists and the assumption is that they will all be gone by the time the Rangers are ready to pick.  Those players are:

1. Jack Hughes, C
2. Kaapo Kakko, RW
3. Vasily Podkolzin, RW
4. Bowen Byram, D
5. Kirby Dach, C
6. Alex Turcotte, C
7. Dylan Cozens, C
8. Trevor Zegras, C
9. Matthew Boldy, LW
10. Peyton Krebs, C

After these ten players there are a number of forwards whose ranking varies from top ten to high twenties.  I’ve included them as possible draft targets for the Rangers.  Could the team pick players out of this range?  Absolutely, as all Rangers fans know, you can never predict what the team will do at the draft.