Montreal Canadiens Top Prospects Countdown: #22 Blake Biondi

Montreal Canadiens general manager has compiled a long list of prospects. We are counting down the top 30.

Montreal Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin has been building through the draft for the past three years. It has resulted in the Habs having one of the deepest group of prospects in the league.

So, we have been counting down the Canadiens Top 30 prospects.

This started on November 1 with the 30th spot going to Jack Gorniak. The 29th spot went to Jacob LeGuerrier, the 28th place was taken by Otto Leskinen, 27th went to Rafael Harvey-Pinard, 26th was Jack Smith, 25th was Jacob Olofsson, 24th was Lukas Vejdemo and the 23rd spot went to Alexander Gordin.

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We continue the countdown today, as we will all month long, with Blake Biondi. Biondi’s rankings were a big all over the map according to our team here at A Winning Habit. He was ranked as high as 19th on my list and as low as 30th on Teddy Elliott’s. Sebastian High had him slotted 20th and Scott Cowan pegged him as his 23rd best prospect in the Canadiens system at the moment.

The fairly large range for Biondi makes sense, and that is mostly because of the quality of competition we have seen Biondi face in the past.

The 6’0″ and 190 pound centre played high school hockey in Minnesota last season. He put up ridiculous offensive numbers, but it is hard to say what those numbers would look like in a more difficult league like the USHL.

Biondi was the Habs 4th round pick in the most recent NHL Draft. He caught their attention by scoring a whopping 37 goals and 76 points in just 25 games. He served as the captain for Hermantown High School and as his incredible numbers might suggest, he was among the league’s leaders in points. To be exact, he finished second and was more than 20 points ahead of his nearest teammate.

Biondi has been on the radar for USA Hockey in the past as well. Sometimes, when players play high school instead of the United States National Development Program, they sort of get forgotten about but that wasn’t the case for Biondi.

The 18 year old scored a goal and three points at the World Under-17 Tournament two years ago and added a goal and an assist at the Ivan Hlinka Tournament in the summer of 2019.

Biondi is a good sized centre that played at a lower level but put up incredible numbers at that level. If he was looking for a tougher league to compete in he certainly found it by committing to the University of Minnesota-Duluth for the upcoming season. They won the past two national championships that were actually played, being crowned champions in 2018 and 2019 before the 2020 Frozen Four was wiped out.

Most polls have Minnesota-Duluth ranked third in the country with the season slated to begin later this week. It will be interesting to see how Biondi blends in at the college level. It is a huge step forward in terms of competition so I would expect a sharp learning curve in year one.

Biondi is not the first player to try and go straight from high school hockey in Minnesota to a successful NHL career. TJ Oshie was drafted in the first round in 2005 after averaging just over three points per game in the same high school league Biondi just played in. Blake Wheeler’s 3.3 points per game was a little higher than Biondi’s 3.06 PPG, and that made Wheeler a fifth overall pick. Brock Nelson was picked late in the first round after scoring 73 points in 25 games in this same league.

I’m not saying Biondi is going to be as good or better than Oshie, Nelson and Wheeler, but he scored at the same rate, or slightly better, than each of them when they were the same age and playing in the same league.

However, it does make the 102nd overall pick in the 2020 NHL Draft an interesting addition for the Canadiens. It will be a big jump to NCAA, but playing on a stacked team will provide Biondi time to slowly work his way up the lineup without too much pressure to dominate.

If he can work his way up the Minnesota-Duluth lineup, he will also be working his way up the Canadiens prospect rankings.