Is Canucks prospect Jonathan Lekkerimäki becoming underrated?

The fine folks over at EliteProspects released their annual ranking of the top 100 NHL-affiliated prospects last week, and three Vancouver Canucks prospects made the list.

Contrary to most rankings, Tom Willander was not named as Vancouver’s top prospect here – in fact, he didn’t quite crack the top-50.

Instead, it was the recently-drafted Braeden Cootes, who just managed to sneak into the bottom end of that top-50 at #44 overall.

But nestled right in between Cootes and Willander on EliteProspect’s list at #48 overall, and as the Canucks’ second-best prospect, is Jonathan Lekkerimäki.

Second-best is the exact same ranking given to Lekkerimäki by our own Dave Hall last month – though Hall had Willander ahead of Lekkerimäki, not Cootes. And with such consistently high rankings around the mediasphere, it’s clear that Lekkerimäki is getting at least some of the hype and praise due to him. It’s hard to be highly ranked and underrated at the same time.

But within the circle of the Vancouver Canucks and their own fans specifically, it does feel as though Lekkerimäki has slowly but surely become overrated all the same. Look around at mock rosters for the 2025-26 season, and you won’t see his name appearing all that frequently. The Canucks are known to be on the lookout for additional offence, and yet most are predicting that their top offensive prospect is going to spend the bulk of the year in Abbotsford.

There’s ample hype about the impact Willander might have this season, in addition to fellow young defenders Elias Pettersson and Victor Mancini. There are even some high hopes being handed out to other prospect forwards, like Aatu Räty and Arshdeep Bains.

But all is pretty quiet on the Lekkerimäki front. Should it be?

Lekkerimäki just completed his first full season of North American hockey after having made a short, six-game cameo in Abbotsford at the tail-end of last season. Prior to that, he’d spent just one full season in the SHL, and played most of the rest of his hockey at the Swedish lower tiers.

With that in mind, many were expecting a difficult transition for Lekkerimäki. Instead, he kind of lit the AHL on fire.

Lekkerimäki’s stat line for Abbotsford in 2024-25 reads 36 games played, 19 goals, nine assists, and 28 points. The reason he didn’t play a full season has a little to do with a short-term injury, but much more to do with the fact that he spent 24 games in the NHL. His stint in Vancouver only included three goals and three assists for six points, which is not bad at all for a 20-year-old.

But if we’re talking about Lekkerimäki as a prospect, those AHL stats are obviously more important. And they’re a fairly impressive and unique set, at that.

Let’s be honest here: it’s all about the goals. For one, because Lekkerimäki is a player who makes his reputation on goal-scoring. And for another, because 19 goals in 36 games is an exceptional result for one’s first season in the AHL.

How exceptional? Lekkerimäki’s 19 goals in 36 games work out to a goal-per-game rate of 0.528, which was good for the eighth-best rate in the entire AHL last season.

The list of players ranked ahead of Lekkerimäki is both short and consists entirely of players much older than him. Included are Abbotsford teammate Linus Karlsson (a league-leading 0.719 goals-per-game) and former Canuck Aidan McDonough (0.625) and Daniel Sprong (0.579). But both Karlsson and McDonough are 25 years old, and Sprong is 27.

The only player with a higher AHL goals-per-game than Lekkerimäki who is even truly ‘prospect-aged’ was San Diego’s Sam Colangelo, 23 years old with a 0.550 GPG.

To put up such numbers at such a young age and with so little prior experience is clearly an indicator of Lekkerimäki’s overall goal-scoring skill.

We went back through the last several AHL seasons looking for comparables and came up pretty short. The only other 20-year-olds (or younger) to put up a goal-per-game rate like Lekkerimäki’s in recent memory are Quinton Byfield, (nine goals in 16 games in 2022-23), Nick Robertson, (16 goals in 28 games in 2021-22) and Trevor Zegras (10 goals in 17 games in 2020-21 at age 19).

It’s a fairly exclusive club. And we’ll point out that Lekkerimäki has the largest sample size of the set, and is also the only one to be new to North American hockey when he put up those numbers. This is also not a case of a young player receiving an outsized opportunity on a bad team – Lekkerimäki did this for a Calder Cup champion roster. It’s a remarkable accomplishment, any way you slice it.

So, how has Lekkerimäki gone from that to becoming underrated?

Much of it comes down to how those aforementioned Calder Cup Playoffs went down.

Toward the end of the 2024-25 campaign, Lekkerimäki suffered an injury that required some oral surgery. That seemed to impact his ability to put up any consistent points during his last run of play in Vancouver. And when he returned to the Abbotsford playoff lineup wearing a bubble cage to protect his mouth, the circumstances were clearly difficult and affecting his play on the ice.

Lekkerimäki struggled, and with the rest of the Abbotsford team rolling, there was no time to allow him to work through it. As a result, Lekkerimäki wound up being made a healthy scratch for much of Round 2 and into Round 3, ultimately sitting out eight of the team’s 24 postseason games.

The young Swede did return to the lineup once he was free of the bubble-cage, and he did manage to put up some numbers in the end, finishing with three goals and seven points in 16 games. But three goals in 16 games is a far cry from his regular season rate.

With hockey being a sport of ‘what have you done for me lately?’, it’s not hard to see how this caused a bit of the shine to come off what was otherwise a truly excellent debut season for Lekkerimäki. The thrilling highs of the Abbotsford run couldn’t help but contrast sharply with Lekkerimäki’s personal struggles, especially since neither the younger Elias Pettersson nor Willander took part in the run, leaving Lekkerimäki as the top prospect on the team.

Him being made a healthy scratch made plenty of sense within the context of the situation, but it came off as a major disappointment all the same.

Add that together with Lekkerimäki’s less-than-consistent results at the NHL level last year, and you can understand why many just want him to play in Abbotsford and succeed there in 2025-26 – especially with the list of wingers currently ranked ahead of him including Brock Boeser, Jake DeBrusk, Conor Garland, Evander Kane, Nils Höglander, Kiefer Sherwood, Drew O’Connor, and probably Karlsson and Bains, too.

Lekkerimäki has been lumped in more with the Vitali Kravtsov crowd; the group of players who aren’t out of the running, but who need to have really excellent camps to even have a hope of cracking the roster. And that’s not untrue – Lekkerimäki would need to have a great showing to insert himself into that mix of wingers.

But what is probably being underrated at this point, if not outright discounted, are Lekkerimäki’s chances of having that great showing and cracking the roster all the same.

Lekkerimäki has been healthy all offseason, giving him lots of time to work on his game. Last season, he could have been forgiven for taking a slight step back in the transition to North American hockey. Instead, he stepped forward, scoring as many goals (19) in just 36 AHL games as he had the previous year in 46 SHL games. In other words, Lekkerimäki transitioned to a smaller rink and tougher competition and still increased his goal-scoring rate. That says something about his upward trajectory, and it’s not the sort of trajectory that can be easily interrupted by a short-term injury.

The Vancouver Canucks are also in need of offence, and shooters in particular. Last season, they were an especially low-shooting team, and they suffered as a result. They’ve added Kane to the roster, sure, but at the same time, they’ve dropped Pius Suter. Having someone come in with a pre-established ability to absolutely rip shots would be a significant plus, and that player is already available in the form of Lekkerimäki. His shot could be an especially potent addition to the power play, which has recently suffered from a lack of shooting velocity.

Put it all together, and it sure sounds as though Lekkerimäki should be being pencilled in to a lot more 2025-26 Canucks lineups than he currently is. That makes him an underrated prospect, at least for the present moment. But perhaps not for long.