Prospect Grades: Zach Benson
If there’s any stress test for this system of grading prospects’ tools, and evaluating them based solely on the sum total of their tools, it’s Zach Benson.
If any prospect is likely to be truly greater than the sum of his parts, it’s Zach Benson.
The most impressive thing about Benson is that he seems to have a perfect grasp of his current strength and limitations, and he’s built a style of game that perfectly accentuates his strengths and noticeably mitigates his weaknesses.
It’s what makes his grades so difficult. I’ve changed them numerous times. In diving into the film to prepare this article, I changed some of them again.
It took longer for him than any other prospect, but I finally believe I’ve described what makes Benson tick. And why any team beyond pick 4 should be clamoring to draft him?
Speed: 6.25/10
5.5-6.25 NHL average: neither strength nor weakness to concern yourself with overly.
Zach Benson doesn’t really have a separating gear. If he pulls away from the opposing team, there’s a decent chance that a speedy back checker will recover in time to pressure Benson and his passing options.
It takes some serious hustle. But it can be done.
Those moments where Benson fails to pull away from the opposition are enough to convince me that his speed is NHL average, but not much more.
For what’s preferred in a skater of his size, his skating speed is below average. It is a weakness, in a sense.
But Benson has developed a litany of ways to work around this flaw that seems projectable to the NHL level, which saves him from any below-average grades.
What gets him to the top of the average? All of the devastating forecheck moments where he’s wreaking havoc as F1 or winning loose puck races.
Even Olen Zellweger isn’t safe from Benson’s hellacious forechecking prowess. He gets destroyed here and it leads directly to a goal.
Smarts… hustle… all the intangibles to explain how this is possible? They’re all great. They’re all right. But it remains true that you can’t do this to Olen Zellweger if you’re slow.
Benson’s anticipation is a superpower. He takes optimal routes to the puck, and he recognizes the start of a race moments before his opposition. In that way, he’s like an excellent outfielder whose jumps are always pristine and whose routes to the ball are perfect.
When you’re constantly giving yourself the easy road and a head start? You’re gonna seem pretty fast as long as you aren’t egregiously slow. And Benson isn’t that.
Edges: 9/10
8.75-9.5: I consider it more likely than not that this trait reaches an elite projection.
Zach Benson’s feet, and his agility, are fairly special. Like Dvorsky, a lack of explosion is what holds him back from receiving the highest marks in this category.
There is no Cale Makar inspired pushes off of the inside edge to create profound separation. He can’t jam the brakes, start a blizzard, and launch himself in the opposite direction like Nathan MacKinnon.
Yet what he does with his feet is undoubtedly special.
There’s what he does in moments like this, where he keeps his feet moving and his legs churning where other players would have been pinned and dispossessed.
He has a slippery quality along the walls that reminds me of another undersized winger, Johnny Gaudreau. Gaudreau is shockingly good in tight spaces, and this is why. He has the feet to escape tight jams. So does Benson.
And he can turn on a dime. He can create separation with a series of cuts and turns. It isn’t as effortless as the truly brilliant skaters. It isn’t as majestically powerful as those generational skater talents, but it’s enough to serve his purposes and create lanes for a pass.
Instances like these will only become more plentiful as he adds power. These qualities of his feet are projectable.
If he adds enough power, there’s very little that Benson won’t be able to accomplish on his edges at the NHL level.
Hands: 10/10
10: Virtual certainty to be among the high-end NHLers.
Zach Benson’s control of the puck is nothing short of beautiful. It’s unrelenting. It doesn’t falter when he’s pressured, or when he’s accepting a pass in his skates.
There’s manipulation in the way his hands work, constant shifts and shimmies of his wrists and shoulders that are meant to fool goalies and defenders alike. These plays with his hands in tight are Benson’s primary means of scoring.
He doesn’t score from a distance. He tucks home loose pucks and he dekes out goalies.
Even if Benson doesn’t pan out as a star or even a top-6 forward, I’m absolutely certain that it won’t be because his hands failed him.
Unlike Dvorsky, Benson is already adept at the manipulations required to pull off effective dekes.
He’d do these things more often if his primary goal was to cut past defenders. Usually, his goal is to find passing lanes.
But sometimes, when he’s forced to reckon with the fact that he doesn’t have the speed or the power to drive the net when other players could, you see just how deceptive his hands really are.
Here, he has a defender falling on an imaginary grenade and sets up a goal when his lack of ideal skating/size should have kept him from scoring.
Benson lacks the audacity of a Bedard or a Matvei Michkov or a Will Smith.
He doesn’t try to knife his way through traffic like Bedard does… or at least not often.
The key here is that he can do that. His lack of elite top speed makes those opportunities rare. But, when those opportunities come? He doesn’t miss.
In a draft where the skill level is at its highest, and handsy forwards abound, Zach Benson still finds a way to stand out from the rest.
Vision: 11/10.
11: Generational. Could be high-end in the NHL right from their draft season. One of one.
I hesitated to give this score. Not because I felt it was unearned, exactly. Because it almost felt wrong.
This is a forward who almost surely won’t go in the top-5 of his draft class, and yet I’m willing to say that he has a generational trait.
Sure, you say Connor Bedard has generational traits. No problem.
If I were to score him straight 11s, nobody would question me. If I were to say that his strength and balance were generational, people would blithely accept that as part of the Bedard mythos.
I’m not saying Benson is a generational prospect. I’m saying that he has a trait so undoubtedly special that it’s a step above my scale.
I had Benson marked down for a 10 in this category ever since the inception of this project. But after doing some more film reviews for this article, I finally admitted to myself that 10 was inadequate.
He’s simply too good at passing the puck.
Zach Benson is one of the very best passers on earth, including in the NHL. And that isn’t a projection. It’s an observation.
Think about this: why is the scouting world so brazenly certain in the projectability of a 5’9″ kid who may generously be listed at 160lbs and who doesn’t get easy separation with skating speed?
It’s because Benson is breaking the rules. He’s breaking the game, and he’s using his passing to do it.
Even when he can’t beat his man and drive the middle lane himself, it doesn’t matter. He just absorbs pressure and finds an impossible pass to a teammate.
He doesn’t do this occasionally. He does it frequently. It’s something of a survival mechanism.
Benson uses his borderline supernatural passing gifts to drive play when his legs can’t. That’s why he’s been the Winnipeg ICE’s best player for 2 years running, despite the 9th overall pick of the 2022 draft being his linemate.
A normal top prospect probably just skates by their check and gains the middle by themselves. Three powerful strides and a nice deke, and they’re alone with the goalie.
Benson doesn’t have majestic acceleration, though. And he knows it. So he stops at the blue line and cuts laterally to the middle.
He understands that one defender was splitting the difference between two ICE attackers. So he makes himself the bigger threat. Absorbs the pressure. Then threads an impossible pass to a teammate.
They create the entry. They go and score the goal.
The thing about Benson’s passing is that he isn’t just highly creative. He doesn’t just put up highlight passes and force you to ignore his myriad turnovers, like a Will Smith may.Â
He’s freakishly accurate for how creative he is with his playmaking and his reliance on it.
That’s because he’s forcing CHLers to defend passing plays that only the best NHLers in the world can pull off.
I could pull any of 500 clips depicting Benson one-touch passing a puck across the ice—through a labyrinth of sticks—to the tape of his teammate for an easy goal.
He does it so frequently that I occasionally think Nikita Kucherov decided to change his name to Zachary and bully some 18-20-year-olds for fun.
Hitting insanely small passing windows is routine to Benson.
The lane to get this pass-through appeared for a fraction of a second, and it was about as wide as the puck. It didn’t matter. Benson executed perfectly, as he often must.
He made it look easy and did it all on his backhand. As he often must.
It’s impossible to talk too much about the passing when discussing Benson. The passing is the key to his game. It’s his secret sauce.
It’s what makes him such a special prospect.
It’s what makes him worth taking a risk on. When discussing the flaws in his game, and the reasons it may not work, you have to realize why it’s worked so far: Benson has made it work.
And he’s done it, in large part, by becoming one of the best playmakers on this planet.
Strength: 4.25/10.
3.0-4: Potentially crippling flaw at the NHL level.
You’ll notice that there’s no true tier accompanying Benson’s grade in this category. That’s on purpose. It’s how precise I want to be when talking about this category.
Zach Benson’s size and strength may cripple his ability to be an effective NHLer. But the probability of that is lower than your average too-small prospect.
He does things to mitigate this flaw already besides being a magical passer. We’ll get into that later.
But it’d also be unfair to say that Benson’s size is merely some limiting factor that is simply worked around.
He’s really small. He shouldn’t even be in the discussion for a top-10 pick. He should be picked in the 3rd round like Brayden Point.
Or in the 4th round like Johnny Gaudreau.
Or maybe not drafted at all, forcing him to prove—for years—that he’s special enough to make it. Like Artemi Panarin, who didn’t even get a chance with an NHL team until he was 24.
Balance: 6.5/10
6.5–7.25: Above NHL average, but unlikely to project to high-end or elite status at the NHL level.
It seems almost unnatural for me to talk about a kid’s size and strength as a borderline crippling flaw while praising their balance as potentially above the NHL average.
That’s one of the reasons Benson is special. He’s stronger on his skates than someone of his size has any right to be. He absorbs and powers through contact at the CHL level more than you’d think possible.
Like an elusive running back who sheds arm tackles like they’re bad habits, Zach Benson is shockingly a pain in the ass to pin down.
Put simply: if you’re going to line this kid up, you better do it right. You best not miss.
If you don’t paste him to the boards, he will shimmy through whatever crevice of space you leave him. And once he’s in space, he can use his feet and his hands to create.
NHL defenders will be forced to reckon with these very same issues.
It won’t be hard, theoretically, for Jacob Trouba to lay the body on little Zach Benson. It isn’t like Benson skates faster than Trouba can think or anything wild like that.
But if Trouba doesn’t line up Benson just right… or any NHL defenseman, for that matter… he’s going to fight through that contact and make his play anyway.
Make no mistake: Zach Benson has no future as a power forward. He will not be protecting pucks down low with any regularity.
But if the brawny defenders of the next level look at Benson’s size and see an easy target? They have another thing coming.
Offensive instincts: 10/10
10: Virtual certainty to be among the high-end NHLers.
Given how I just spent a remarkably large number of words explaining that Benson is a borderline generational playmaker, I suppose I should explain why he’s only getting a 10 for his offensive instincts. After all, these two things are closely intertwined.
And Benson’s playmaking would be enough to carry the whole category to a 9. His destructiveness on the forecheck, and his status as a joyful serial killer of defensive zone exits, raises the bar to a 10.
But part of offensive instincts is the ability to create your own shot.
Benson is no slouch in this department. He can find his own opportunities to shoot. But unlike Matvei Michkov, the only 11 I recorded… or Connor Bedard, who nearly received an 11 himself… Benson can’t will his own shooting opportunities into existence.
Or at least he hasn’t shown it so far.
That was just enough to bring him down to a 10. Which is still an extremely special grade in and of itself.
Defensive instincts: 8.75/10
8.75-9.5: I consider it more likely than not that this trait reaches an elite projection.
Zach Benson may be one of the only prospects in the history of this sport who, in his draft year, would have received both 11-grade playmaking and borderline elite 8.75-grade defensive instincts.
A unique combination to further illustrate what a unique talent he is.
The Winnipeg Ice were the CHL’s premiere power-killing force and Benson was the primary reason for that. He uses his vision for passing lanes to get into the heads of his opponents and intercept their passes.
Once he does, it’s always a very quick transition to offense.
He closes on puck carriers fast, as though he’s a quicker skater than I’d grade him to be. His anticipation is that good. He’s racing while the offensive players still believe it’s time for a jog.
Once he closes that distance, he has the stick to cleanly strip a puck carrier. And once he has the puck: you know the drill. Instant fast-break offense.
Zach Benson isn’t a perfect defensive forward. For one thing, someone as small as him couldn’t be the perfect defensive forward even if their instincts were flawless.
But Benson’s defensive instincts aren’t flawless. They’re high-risk and based on his reads. It makes him a bit of a gambler.
His team is killing a penalty here. They win a neutral zone faceoff, and he sprints right to the opposition’s blue line looking for an opportunity to create offense.
He was right in this read. And he’ll be proven right in his reads more often than not. He’s a good gambler. A very good gambler.
But just like his front office will have to roll the dice by drafting him, his coach has to be willing to roll the dice by defending the way Benson wants to defend.
He isn’t a player for the faint of heart. He isn’t the kind of kid who wants to lock down the NZ all-game and manage the puck to the point of micromanagement.
He wants to defend hard, kill plays early, and then get out running to the offensive end.
Compete level: 10/10.
10: Virtual certainty to be among the high-end of NHLers.
Zach Benson’s motor is endless. It doesn’t stop. He’s relentless. That’s most noticeable on the forecheck, where demon feels like the most appropriate word to describe him.
He works so hard that he forces turnovers where none should exist. That motor is guided by his freakish anticipation, but in this endeavor, It’s the drive that is catalyzing the results.
You don’t have to convince Benson to work hard in games. You don’t have to hope he’ll figure it out, or wait for him to truly want the puck.
He would lay his life on the line for a single puck touch in the first period.
You don’t have to teach him to go to the “dirty areas” of the ice. He attacks the inside with aplomb all on his own.
He finishes every off-puck route and they mostly all filter to the same place: the net. Or the home plate area. The places where goals are scored, especially for someone like him.
He’ll drive the net hard, and he will see himself decapitated if it means scoring a single goal.
Really, the only thing that stopped me from grading this an 11 is that he’s physically unable to bring the traditional “sandpaper” to his game that’s usually expected of the league’s foremost compete guys.
Shooting: 4.25/10
3.0-4: Potentially crippling flaw at the NHL level.
It’s funny to think of a shot from a distance as a problem at the NHL level, given how many goals are scored at the net front. And especially given how brilliant of a passer Benson is, it should be a non-issue.
I’m not convinced it is a non-issue. Playmaking relies on selling yourself as an individual threat. You absorb pressure onto yourself and distribute the puck to liberated teammates who have space aplenty because of your actions.
If Benson isn’t a threat to make things happen with his shot, and I don’t see him beating NHL goalies from a distance as it stands, then defenses may not respect him as enough of a threat to give him all of those passing lanes he exploits now.
To be clear, his shot isn’t bad. His form looks solid and he flashes a good shot at the CHL level, but most CHL goalies… well, they don’t inspire confidence.
I expect his shooting to be one of the easier things to improve upon, and for this score to change as Bedard’s career unfolds.
Conclusion:
You can work on a shot. You can even work on skating, as hard as that is to do.
Zach Benson is no stranger to hard work. Maybe he’s exactly the type of kid you trust to develop those peripherals. Because if he does? There’s no telling his ceiling.
The non-negotiables in this sport, especially for an undersized player, are the brain and the heart. Instincts and a drive to compete are the most necessary ingredients.
Zach Benson’s instincts and compete levels are both beyond reproach. They’re truly exceptional.
His hockey sense is second to none. Just like his tenacity. Combine that with agile skating, world-class playmaking ability, and high-end puck control.
You get a prospect whose flaws haven’t stopped him from becoming a borderline franchise-defining prospect.
8.1-9.0 is the score range in which those franchise cornerstones live.
Zach Benson’s overall grade is 7.97.
This is to say: Despite the risk in his profile, he’s on the verge of doing great things in the NHL.
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Mandatory Credit: Erica Perreaux / Lethbridge Hurricanes
