Cayden Lindstrom: 2024 NHL Draft Prospect Profile: A Prototypical Power Forward With Injury Concerns (2024)

Who is Cayden Lindstrom?

Born on February 3, 2006 in Chetwynd, British Columbia, Cayden Lindstrom is one of the most sought after and intriguing prospects in the 2024 NHL Draft. For the New Jersey Devils to have the opportunity to draft Lindstrom, it would be the product of a very unexpected slip down teams’ boards or the Devils trading up to select him. Neither of those seem likely at this time, but Lindstrom is still a player the Devils are going to be familiar with on draft day.

Elite Prospects

Lindstrom is more of a top ten prospect because of his size and build than how special his production in juniors is. His 46 points in 32 games certainly makes him first round caliber, but he would be a late lottery pick if he were 6’0” and 170 pounds. Instead standing at about 6’4” and weighing 215 pounds already, teams are likely to be enticed by Lindstrom as an athletic force who they hope can be developed into an elite power forward.

Hockey Prospecting

Lindstrom’s 36% star probability and 60% NHLer probability are the same scores Nico Hischier received from Byron Bader’s NHLe projection model on Hockey Prospecting. Lindstrom’s above average production in the WHL, however, did not carry a higher NHLe value than Igor Chernyshov’s production in the MHL. If you saw Chernyshov’s profile on Sunday, he is largely regarded as a mid-first round prospect. There are two big questions on Lindstrom’s draft year — would he have been better if he was not injured, and will his injury issues linger into his professional career?

On The Athletic’s Hockey Show podcast, Corey Pronman reported that Lindstrom’s back injury was not just a muscular injury, but a herniated disc in his lumbar spine. Of course, The Athletic and everyone else knew that Lindstrom had a back injury and an upper-body surgery that kept him out of the top prospects game. While I have questions about the timing of this report, Pronman still thinks that Lindstrom is the second best skater and fourth best athlete, and the guy with the best compete in the draft, but this act of late-bombshell reporting could very well have Lindstrom drop from where he is usually mocked at third, fourth, or fifth overall.

Where Lindstrom is Ranked

Lindstrom is near-universally ranked in the top ten. All rankings are from his Elite Prospects page.

What Others Have to Say About Lindstrom

For Last Word on Hockey, Frederik Frandsen profiled Cayden Lindstrom, pointing to awareness issues on the offensive and defensive ends while praising his physical build, skating ability, motor, and shot. Frandsen writes that Lindstrom “[uses] a variety of weapons to create chances, with the main one being his strength and work ethic. He works extremely hard along the board and never shies away from the dirty areas.” However, if he cannot clean up what Frandsen describes as a tendency make bad passes when looking for high-risk plays while getting lost in the offensive and defensive zone when playing off the puck, he might not live up to such lofty expectations.

On TSN, Craig Button compared Lindstrom to J.T. Miller as an imposing player who will will himself into the scoring areas and consistently beat goaltenders with an excellent shot. Button said, “I believe that Cayden Lindstrom has as much upside potential as any player in this coming draft.” While he described Lindstrom as a very complete package for a prospect, Button did not grade Lindstrom’s offensive zone play as highly as other areas, such as his skating, compete level, and shot.

Video

On his highlight reel from the WHL’s official YouTube page, you will see a guy with awesome shot placement — especially for a left-handed shooter. He takes one-timers, long-range wristers, and scores from bad angles, as he always seems to find the hole in the goalie’s coverage. While his shooting talent looks above average, I was expecting to see some big-time compete plays and goals in the reel, but we will have to see if deeper dives reveal what so many writers love about Lindstrom.

Cayden’s second shift of the video, around the 0:53 mark, shows some of that high compete and motor that was difficult to glean from his WHL highlight package. Flying into the play and forcing a turnover, Lindstrom turns and shoots into someone’s leg. So, not the best play to make after forcing a turnover, but he did disrupt the other team from breaking out. Later in the shift, Lindstrom is unable to dance around a defenseman at the blueline and is forced to hold up play in the corner.

In Lindstrom’s shift at the 2:27 mark, his team gives up the second goal of the game. Lindstrom wins an offensive zone draw, but does not present himself as a pass option for his teammate, opting to stay in the shooting lane. The point shot is blocked by the opponent forward pressuring Lindstrom’s defenseman, and Lindstrom’s weak chip attempt along the boards is not nearly enough to prevent the odd-man rush the other way. Finding himself way behind the play, Lindstrom ends up the fourth skater back as his team finds themselves down two.

Around the 3:20 mark, Lindstrom makes another good play to keep possession in the offensive zone, taking the puck away and preventing a transition play for Calgary. However, he gets bodied alongside the boards as he got separated from the puck on a wide deke and sealed off from recollecting it by the boards. On a disappointing power play, Lindstrom — the netfront man — found himself way off his spot when a golden rebound was in the low slot and cleared away, as Lindstrom saw the shot’s rebound far too late to make a play.

Lindstrom makes up for it at the 5:20 mark, when he collects the puck in the defensive zone and catches up with the play that was sprung ahead. Andrew Basha — a possible late first or second round pick — loses the puck while driving the slot, and amid the sea of bodies in front, Lindstrom chips the loose puck into the goal. Lindstrom later gets a secondary assist to tie the game on the power play.

My Take

I think that Cayden Lindstrom is definitely a candidate to move from center to wing. On his shift tape, I just did not see the 200-foot awareness, positioning, and involvement to make him an NHL center. He is a frequent cherry picker, is not apparently special in the faceoff dot, and he was not very involved in transition play. In the offensive zone, I think he does an alright job of protecting the puck, but I did not like his positioning around the net, especially on the power play. For a guy that is 6’4,” Lindstrom does not like to actually stand in front of the goaltender, allowing the goaltender far too much sight of the puck while not getting his stick on any shots. I was also expecting Lindstrom to be a better skater, but he showed good bursts every now and then.

On the bright side, I was pleasantly surprised by how well Lindstrom jumped opponent transition plays. His greatest skill in the video I saw seemed to be his ability to keep the puck in the offensive zone, though this too was inconsistent with his bad read and low effort on the goal against early in the game. Statistically, though, I must have just seen a bad game for Lindstrom. Mitchell Brown’s CHL tracking data has Lindstrom in the 100th percentile in offensive creation and the 99th percentile in transition involvement.

Mitchell Brown

Of course, the injuries factor in here. Was Lindstrom not getting to as dirty areas once he started dealing with injuries? I did not think his body positioning looked all that great, but he still scored two goals. With a healthy season, Lindstrom might be looking more like the dominant player profiled in Brown’s tracking data than what I saw in his game against Calgary. Still, I think he did get physically involved in finishing his checks and being rough along the boards to an extent I would expect from someone billed as a power forward.

Now, to deal with the ultimate question: if Cayden Lindstrom drops down the board due to his herniated disc, should the Devils pick him? At the 35:20 mark of this video from Rocket Sports, Rocket Sports quoted Pronman as saying, “I’m not a doctor, but I’ve talked to people who know doctors” (this made me laugh a bit), leading Rocket Sports to bring Dr. Stephen Morris onto their show to talk about Lindstrom’s injury. Dr. Morris pushed back on concerns about the herniated disc, saying these lumbar herniations are pretty common — especially so for an athlete playing a contact sport, saying “it’s probably more common than you’d expect” that current NHL athletes are choosing to play through these injuries and rehab them without surgery.

Furthermore, Dr. Morris noted that a recent publication from the Global Spine Journal — which you can find here — found that players with lumbar herniations but do not have the herniations surgically corrected statistically perform similarly to players without reported herniations. However, the journal did find that players who had surgery to correct herniations resulted in shortened careers, though “seasons after RTP were similar between the injured cohort and their healthy matched controls.” Looking into the tabs that divide nonoperative and operatively treated lumbar disc herniations, players who were nonoperatively treated found higher production after rehabilitation, while operatively treated players found lowered — but still NHL-level production. Interestingly, players that opted for surgery tended to have higher pre-injury production than those who opted for rehabilitation.

Even with Pronman’s late “bombshell,” we only really know that Lindstrom missed several weeks with an upper-body surgery. The details are certainly murky, but it does not seem that Lindstrom had any surgery targeting his herniated disc. If that is the case, and he is fully rehabbed by training camp time and the injury does not become chronic, there is not a lot to worry about. But even if the injury became chronic, advances in surgical treatment could still make him perform well above the expected marks upon return to play — just ask Jack Eichel. Even in the Global Spine Journal’s report on NHL players’ ability to recover from lumbar spine surgery, they were mostly dealing with fusions and microdiscectomies — these players in the study were never given the option of having a disc replacement. Lindstrom did return to play after his upper-body surgery and rehab, but was shut down after poor performance in the playoffs. Medicine Hat News reported the following a couple games prior to his shutdown:

The 18-year-old forward suited up in Games 1 and 2 of the Tigers’ first-round series with the Red Deer Rebels last weekend, marking his first appearance in the lineup since Dec. 16. Lindstrom was out after suffering a hand injury in the Tigers’ first skate back from Christmas, an injury that required surgery and rehab, coinciding with the rehab of a back ailment.

To me, that seals the issue. Pronman came out with this big bombshell report that shocked the hockey world and possibly scared several teams from picking him. All the while, his own team’s local reporters had this information all along — that he had hand surgery while rehabbing from his back issues. Unless something else comes out to thicken the plot, it seems that not only should the Devils not pass on Lindstrom if he falls to their lap, but the teams above them would likely be making a huge mistake. Given all that we know about Lindstrom’s health, historical treatment outcomes, and recent advancements in last-resort surgical treatments, Lindstrom should be evaluated squarely on his performance as a player.

Your Thoughts

What do you think about Cayden Lindstrom? Do you think he’ll fall to 10? How do you think he’ll play in the NHL? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, and thanks for reading.