11. Buffalo Sabres — Konsta Helenius, C (Jukurit, SM-Liiga)
Helenius clearly is the top Finnish prospect in this year’s draft and for all intents, as strong a top-five candidate as we’ve seen out of the SM-Liiga in recent years, including Juraj Slafkovsky, whose draft-year production in 2021-22 (10 points in 31 games) pales in comparison to Helenius’ 14 goals and 36 points in 51 contests. In fact, Helenius, a natural playmaker and skilled power-play specialist, averaged 0.43 assists per game during the regular season, which is the highest among all Finnish draft prospects since Aleksander Barkov’s rate of 0.51 during the 2012-13 season.
Bottom line: There’s no need to pull an all-nighter to find the smoking gun that links the Sabres’ scouting staff and their draft-day decisions with the analytics department, which is another way of saying near-historic production levels by any draft prospect certainly won’t go unnoticed in Buffalo. The Sabres as an organization may have taken a step backward in their plight to end a 13-year playoff drought and, yes, they are already loaded with young centers of quality. But it’s doubtful the staff deviates from their MO of taking the best player available, at Helenius would be exactly that if he slips out of the top 10.
Surprise pick: Igor Chernyshov, LW/C (Dynamo Moscow, KHL) — On the heels of an impressive draft-1 campaign in which he averaged a point a game for Dynamo’s junior club, Chernyshov looked both mature and dangerous during a well-deserved KHL stint in which he appeared in 34 games. He hasn’t generated the kind of hype we’ve seen from Ivan Demidov and Anton Silayev, but Chernyshov is the kind of prospect who should have every NHL scouting staff on board due to his power-forward game and high projectability.
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