Inside Wheeler’s Shocking Summer 2025 NHL Prospect Rankings: Who’s the True Future Star?

Mrtka is a towering right-shot defenseman who skates extremely well and played huge all-situations minutes for Czechia at the Hlinka last summer and then Seattle in the WHL and the national team again at U18 worlds in Texas (where he was outstanding in the tournament opener against Team USA but didn’t stand out in the same way in Czechia’s other games). With the Thunderbirds, he was phenomenal, playing to nearly a point per game on a low-scoring team, logging an average of 27 minutes and often 30, and going over the boards first on both the power play and penalty kill. There was debate in the 2025 draft class as to who the second-best D was, but for me, it was Mrtka. He’s very intriguing and I’m higher on him than I was on other towering recent high picks such as Anton Silayev and Dmitri Simashev (though he and Silayev are extremely close for me and I thought about ranking Mrtka below him here).

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