The Carolina Hurricanes have long been one of if not the most progressive organization at the draft in recent years. They amass a mountain of picks one trade-down manoeuvre at a time, and then they make high-upside bets in the later rounds like clockwork. You really love to see it.

Another significant contributor to their progressive bona fides is their ability to identify and mine market inefficiencies on the draft floor. This past year, that meant collecting many of the highly-touted Russian players in the draft at well below retail price as other teams gravitated away from them, albeit for perfectly understandable reasons.

Still, the Hurricanes find themselves seven spots lower than when we last conducted this exercise. Seth Jarvis, the crown jewel of their prospect pool for the past two seasons, graduated to the NHL and made an immediate impact, looking the part of a future top-six winger. Joey Keane opted to fly for playing time in the KHL while Jesper Sellgren returned to Sweden after just one campaign with the Chicago Wolves. 

In addition to those departures, many of the Hurricanes' prospects failed to take positive steps in their development, with some even arguably regressing. And one also has to factor in that the organization hasn't picked in the first round since they selected Jarvis back in 2020, though this is partly due to their choice as they traded down from their late first-round pick in 2021. 

All that said, the Hurricanes still have a solid pool of eligible talent, having four of their top skaters slotted in our top 100 affiliated prospect rankings. On top of that, they have a bunch of high upside bets, and if some of those bets pan out as they expect, we could see them even higher next year despite them likely yet again missing a high pick in 2023.