#10 - You'll never guess where Matt Savoie ranks on list of world's best young players🔥

You will never guess where Edmonton Oilers forward Matt Savoie, 22, ranks on The Athletic’s list of the world’s best U-23 players.

He’s not on it.

He doesn’t make the cut.

He’s not in the Top 50 or the Top 100.

Indeed, The Athletic’s Corey Pronman ranked the world’s top 156 U-23 players and neither Savoie nor Oilers prospect Ike Howard, 22, made the list.

Seriously?

Seriously.

That’s what happened.

I found this curious, given that Savoie was a strong AHL rookie in 2024-25 at age 21 and put in a solid performance as an NHL rookie this past year. He’s one of just 25 players from his draft 2022 draft class who have made the jump and stuck the landing in the NHL so far.

Not only did Savoie earn a spot on a playoff team, he worked his way up the Oilers line-up from the bottom lines to the Top Six, playing regularly with Connor McDavid as the regular season wound down. Savoie was an OK defensive player, an OK penalty killer, decent when it came to physical play and aggressive chasing the puck.

After the Olympic break, he caught fire as a scorer, putting up nine goal and 19 points in 24 games.

It was perplexing for me, then, that Savoie failed to make Pronman’s list.

I dug in a bit, looking at players similar to Savoie in size and style of play, to see if there was any obvious reason why they were deemed to be superior to Savoie. I found 19 such players, all of them under 6-feet tall, all of them high-skill players, just like Savoie, and just like Howard as well.

One thing that Pronman likely and rightly held against Savoie is that he’s 22 now and will be 23 on January 1, so he’s one of the oldest players on the list. He’s accomplished for his age, but there are younger similar players who have done as much. There are also newly-drafted players who can be expected to do much more than Savoie, such as the No. 1 pick in this year’s draft, Gavin McKenna, and the No. 2 pick Ivar Stenberg.

And while Savoie finished up strong in the regular season, overall he had just 37 points in 82 games, just 0.45 points per game. It’s easy to see why Pronman would have younger players like Bedard, 1.09 points per game, Logan Cooley, 0.8 points pe game, Zach Benson, 0.66 points per game, Matvei Michkov, 0.63 ponts per game and Frank Nazar, 0.62 points per game, ahead of Savoie.

But Sabres forward Noah Ostlund, about the same size and age as Savoie, also had 0.45 points per game yet he was ranked 91st on the list.

If Ostlund can pull a 91 ranking, why can’t Savoie find his way into the Top 100?

Another similar player Roman Kantserov had 64 points in 63 KHL games, which is impressive, but it’s a long way from making it in the NHL. Yet Kantserov ranked 37th overall. I haven’t seen Kantserov, so maybe he’s got such an amazing skillset that he deserves to be ranked much higher than Zach Benson at 124th overall and to be a player ranked well ahead of Savoie and Howard. But I wonder.

The best thing about this list?

It’s good bulletin board material for Savoie. If he didn’t have enough motivation, this is the kind of thing that can add some fuel to his fire.

Of course, all these players are young and who knows where they will end up? Injury and luck will play their parts.

Right now, though, having seen Savoie’s two-way game take off in the last part of the 2025-26 regular season, I’ll be surprised if half of the players on Pronman’s list turn out to be better NHLers than Matt Savoie.