2025 TLN Maple Leafs Prospect Rankings: #19 Hudson Malinoski

The TLN Maple Leafs prospect rankings were compiled by a panel of seven TLN writers, each ranking our top 20 prospects to form a consensus group ranking.

Rather than hard and fast limits on age or NHL games played to determine “prospect” eligibility, our group decided on a more nuanced approach to include any reasonably young player who is either under contract with the Leafs or on the club’s reserve list, who has not yet established himself as a full-time NHLer.

Every year I have the opportunity to write about Hudson Malinoski, and every year I enjoy telling the story a little bit more than the last. Simply put, he shouldn’t be pursuing an NHL career right now. He had a near-death accident when he was in his teens, and despite there being a point in his life when professional hockey seemed like a pipe dream for him, he was able to prevail and hear his name called at the 2023 NHL Draft, and now he’s heading into his third season of college hockey with steady improvement shown each year.

I’m going to link back to a great piece done by Darren Zary of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix where you can read a much more in depth version of Malinoski’s story. The gist of it is that when he was 13 years old, he was on the roof of his family home shoveling snow into a snowboard jump for him and his friend when he slipped and fell off the roof, hitting his head at the bottom of a 12-foot fall. He was taken to the emergency room at a local hospital, where he was diagnosed with a concussion, but the prognosis was much worse than that. In the days following the initial diagnosis, he was unable to move his neck and was frequently throwing up and battling dizziness. A follow-up appointment revealed that he had suffered a torn vertebral artery, which is located in the neck and supplies blood to the brain.

Had Malinoski and his family not caught this early, it could have led to a stroke or a brain aneurysm, both potentially fatal outcomes. If this wasn’t enough stress on him and his family, they eventually made the decision to have him undergo a unique type of artery repair surgery that had never been performed on a child before. Nobody knew if he would be able to skate again, let alone pursue an NHL career, but thankfully, he came out victorious, both from a quality of life standpoint and the ability to still pursue a career in professional hockey as a bonus. But that was a long way away, and he had to play lots of catchup before he really got his career back on track.

When he was 14 years old, he returned to hockey with the Saskatoon River Kings AA team. He cracked the AAA team the following year but his first season was stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic. He didn’t end up playing his first full AAA season until he was 17 years old, and while most of his counterparts were hearing their names called at the NHL draft that year, Malinoski continued to plug away. He spent his second season of draft eligibility with the Brooks Bandits, a Junior-A team out of Alberta, and his performance led to the Toronto Maple Leafs calling his name in the fifth round of the 2023 NHL Draft.