If the Penguins are able to rebuild themselves into a contending team at any point in the near future, the 2025 NHL Draft class might be one of the biggest reasons why.<\/p>\n
Even though the Penguins did not have a top-five pick that year, they still came away with three of the top-24 picks in the draft thanks to a series of trades, and they might come away with a couple of NHL players as a result.<\/p>\n
They already look to have one NHL player in No. 11 overall pick Ben Kindel, while there is a lot of hope for picks No. 22 (Bill Zonnon) and No. 24 (Horcoff). The other two are still ahead in the top-25 under 25 rankings, and now Horcoff is the first of that group to appear on the list.<\/p>\n
He does drop one spot from where he was a year ago, but do not take that as a sign of him regressing. It is actually a sign of the improvement within the Penguins farm system and how they actually have some real prospect depth at the moment. It is a night and day difference from where they were even just two years ago.<\/p>\n
There was always a lot to like about Horcoff as a prospect, ranging from the fact he is the son of an NHL player (long-time NHL forward Shawn Horcoff), to his massive size, to the fact he is a smart player with a great defensive awareness. He had shown some flashes of goal production going into his draft year that he split between the U.S. National Development Team and the University of Michigan, and he really started to build on that during the 2025-26 season.<\/p>\n
In his first full season at the NCAA level, Horcoff absolutely took off offensively, scoring 25 goals in 40 games. That goal total put him into a tie for second place in the entire country, trailing only the 29 goals scored by Dartmouth\u2019s Hayden Stavroff.<\/p>\n
That production really stood out to Penguins assistant general manager Jason Spezza, who had this to say about Horcoff\u2019s emergence during the season.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe were attracted to the qualities that are giving him success now, so I\u2019m not shocked, but I\u2019m also pleasantly surprised,\u201d Spezza said. \u201cIt\u2019s a hard league to come into and do what he\u2019s doing at that age. For a big man, he gets inside, but he also knows how to find the quiet areas in the slot. He\u2019s got a nice release. He\u2019s got a natural goal-scoring touch. And I just think he\u2019s a student of the game. He spends a lot of time working on his game, thinking on his game and he\u2019s benefiting from that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Along with the 25 goals in the NCAA, he also made the United States World Junior team and scored a goal with an assist in his five games at the tournament.<\/p>\n
The big questions around Horcoff now become a matter of upside, and how repeatable his 2025-26 performance may have been.<\/p>\n
The other aspects of his game (the size, the physical play, the defensive play) have always been there, and always gave him a chance to be an NHL player, at least in a depth role. But when he adds 25 goals in 40 games at the NCAA level to that package it starts to open your eyes a little bit more. It makes you think there might be a little more potential in there than \u201cjust a guy\u201d at the next level.<\/p>\n
But he has to show he can not only do that again, but also build on it.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s a potential red flag or \u201cprove it\u201d thing with his performance, it\u2019s that he went on an early season shooting bender that resulted in him scoring on more than 23 percent of shots for the season. That\u2019s a high number. A really high number. And it might not be totally repeatable. The projection around him changes a lot if he\u2019s not scoring goals at that rate on a consistent or even consistent basis.<\/p>\n
He is going to have another year at the University of Michigan to prove himself and probably will not become a potential factor in the NHL until 2027-28. If he even comes close to repeating his 2025-26 performance offensively, the Penguins quickly go from having an intriguing prospect to having a very serious power forward prospect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We are starting to get into the top young players in the Pittsburgh Penguins organization, and we continue…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1015142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[42],"tags":[529,293,76408,62,15777,70205,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-1015141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-analysis","tag-nhl","tag-pittsburgh-penguins-prospects","tag-sports","tag-statistics","tag-top-25-under-25","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117134173198861496","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1015142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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