Best Value NHL Fantasy Picks of the First 50 2026-27

The first 50 picks of any draft is very difficult to squeeze any value out of. Every podcast, blog, and news site has content on these early rankings. Even the most casual fans will know most of these names so the ability to outsmart people is much more limited. Today we will focus on places where the players ADP is much later than it should be. These are the best early round picks for your 2025/26 fantasy drafts.

All analysis is based on a Yahoo points league on default settings.

HM: Alex DeBrincat

Alex DeBrincat will kick off the honorable mentions. Last year he was 14th overall in points and is currently sitting at an ADP of 40.6. While this was definitley a career year for him, drafting him in this range is a bet on proven upside that I love. Additionally, he also is on the third longest iron man streak (behind brent Burns and Nick Suzuki) having played the last 456 consecutive games. This gives him a much higher floor than a lot of other upside picks in this range.

However, there are some concerns that do drop him out of the top 5. The Red Wings are a bit of a questionable team at the moment with the serious risk of losing Dylan Larkin who has played next to DeBrincat for the last 3 years. They also had a pretty poor offseason: “firing” their GM without a replacement, only adding Arvidsson and Tarasov, and losing an old Patrik Kane is not what you want to see from a team that is looking to get into the playoffs with probably the hardest schedule in the entire NHL.

None of this should stop you from swooping DeBrincat up as a player that you can realistically get second round value from early in the 4th and is as injury resistant as you are going to find in the NHL.

My Ranking: 33 (-7.6 vs ADP)

HM2: Nathan MacKinnon

Look, this pick is almost completely unactionable as he should always be first or second overall in every league. He has been the best player in fantasy hockey every year for the past 3 years by an average of nearly 80 fantasy points, and is on an absolute wagon of a team. People love to ask who the numer 1 overall pick should be, and 3 years of evidence points to MacKinnon. There is a real world where things go wrong, of course, but he is on the most dominant individual fantasy run that we have seen in a very long time. This isn’t an exciting pick but getting him with the 1st overall pick will probably end up being one of the best picks of the entire draft.

My Ranking: 1 (-0.9 vs ADP)

5: Dylan Guenther

With Clayton Keller finally becoming properly rated, someone needed to take on the role of being an underrated winger for the Mammoth. Dylan Guenther is a 23 year old winger who has been a solid draft pick for the past few years. Last year he was the 24th best forward in Yahoo default scoring, and he is being priced as though he will do slightly worse than that. A lot of the time when a young player puts up a season like this their value goes through the roof. Guenther has consistently improved season after season which makes the numbers he put up seem a bit quieter, but if he can continue this trajectory putting up over a point per game is definitely in his wheelhouse.

When people think of these young upside guys in this range they tend to gravitate to Gauthier and Carlsson who are a bit younger, but are much less proven and on a Ducks team that has seemingly imploded in this offseason by trading away all of their defense and having a terrible cap situation. I see Guenther as having a comparable ceiling as these two with a drastically higher floor. This pick is a great risk that is unlikely to completely sewer your draft.

My Ranking: 31 (-9.5 vs ADP)

4: Brandon Hagel

I am not particularly high on the lightning as a whole. They are a good team that is starting to get somewhat past their prime making real steps up in performance less likely. With that being said, Hagel is a fantastic player who has delivered consistently and is only 28 with a few years of his prime still left. Last year he missed 11 games, some of which were reported to be simply a precaution as Tampa had already locked the playoffs. I think this is skewing the numbers and causing people to be lower on a lower risk option than they should be.

In 2025/26 Hagel was frankly amazing when he was healthy. He ended up as the 21st best fantasy forward while playing only 71 games. If he had played a full season, which is likely due to only missing 1 game in the previous 3 years, he would have had 783 points (Yahoo default scoring). This would have placed him as forward number 9, ahead of a healthy Kaprisov (78 games) and Pastrnak (77 games). Hagel is good value not due to potential or risk, but simply because he is priced wrong.

My Ranking: 24 (-13 vs ADP)

3: Evan Bouchard

Evan Bouchard is a stud in fantasy and I am tired of pretending that he isn’t. While yes he can cause dumb turnovers and be not great defensively (which is overstated), fantasy hockey does not care about that at all. Over the past 3 years this 26 year old defensman has been a top 3 defensman every year (1st, 3rd, 3rd) and has missed 2 games in the past 5 years. I don’t like taking huge swings in the first 2 rounds and Bouchard has been as consistent as they come.

Here is where I actually fade him relative to what my calculator says. I projected his points above replacement to be 6th overall (+331 when adjusted for risk) putting him between Draisaitl and Werenski. A lot of the times you can get him an entire round later a lot of the time and if you miss out there are plenty of massively underrated defensmen out there. I have him ranked at #10 (directly ahead of Werenski and Hughes) but if you want to push that up even further I see no issue with that. While the ADP change is not the largest on the list every spot is worth a lot more in these early rounds.

My Ranking: 10 (-5.6 vs ADP)

2: Logan Thompson

I don’t like drafting goalies early. I am a real fan of trying to get a few goalies after round 5-6 and just letting the hockey gods decide how I will do here. Logan Thompson is an exception. He was the second best goalie last year and his stats have been elite for a long time before that. If you want to grab an early goalie, this should be the one.

There are a few concerns with every goalie that must be addressed, their backup and their team. We can throw genuine concern with the backup situation in Washington. Two years ago Charlie Lindgren got 39 starts to Thompson’s 43, and they were both good. Last year Lindgren missed significant time with injuries and his role was fully covered by Thompson. I am expecting a slight decrease in games from Thompson, but I expect a real 1/2 goalie setup as opposed to the 1A/1B they had before. If you expect differently don’t draft him unless he falls a round plus from his ADP.

The team in front of a goalie can do a lot of work here too. If they can be defensivley good it will reduce goals scored and if they can be good in general they will increase the wins of the goalie, giving them more points. My hot take this season is the Capitals will win the stanley cup. While they did miss the playoffs last year and lose John Carlsson, they finished 12th in regular season points (most points since 2019 to miss the playoffs) and will have another year of development for young stars like Cole Hutson, Ilya Protas, and Ryan Leonard. They also probably had the best offseason of the entire league . They lost Connor McMichael, a very good 3rd liner, and added depth as well as TWO FIRST LINE PLAYERS IN JORDAN KYROU AND ALEX TUCH. That is truly a sentence you should be hearing in a Steve Dangle screaming voice. If you put an elite goalie behind an elite team, that goalie will give you loads of fantasy points. Being able to get him as late as round 3 makes it even sweeter and makes him the only goalie in the top 50 that is truly undervalued.

My Ranking: 22 (-8 vs ADP)

1: Rasmus Dahlin

Rasmus Dahlin is the one player on this list that I had to redo my calculations on because the discrepencey is so large between the results I was seeing and the ADP. Rasmus Dahlin was on a terrible Buffalo Sabres and was elite. Then they got good, and he continued to be elite. He missed games last season, not because he was injured, but because his fiance had a heart transplant. If I wanted a draft that I know will preform, I would draft Dahlin every round for 16 rounds. He was defensman 8 last year in a year and 36th overall, and 21st in points above replacement. This makes an ADP of 35.4 egregious and Dahlin the best pick in the first 5 rounds by far.

Similar to Bouchard, Dahlin suffers from a massive dissagreeement between my calculator and ADP which forced me to drop him. He is analyzed as the 10th overall player in the draft which recommends a 2+ round reach on him to get “fair” value. So I dropped him low enough that he is still gettable in a majority of drafts and providing me massive value every time I can get my grubby little hands on him. Getting him outside of the first is a steal, the real question is how greedy do you want to be?

My Ranking: 16 (-19.4 vs ADP)