The Blue Jackets selected Cayden Lindstrom with the 4th Overall Pick and got, outside of Macklin Celebrini, perhaps the best 5v5 player and one of the premier rush producers in the draft. It doesn’t hurt that he’s 6’3” and an incredible athlete but also that he’s only got positively glowing character references.
In the above breakdown, you’ll get a great preview of what makes Lindstrom special. In short, he’s got some of the best ability to improve the conditions of the puck en route to moving it up ice. He gets defensive stops, gets the puck off the wall and uses the middle in transition.
He’s still very much a raw prospect, though, who should be given ample opportunity to continue his incredible growth. On the whole, he’ll need to improve his defensive posture, lengthen out his skating and start chaining together his reads/moves more rapidly. Sometimes, he can stop his feet and watch the play instead of “looking for work”. He flashes advanced playmaking ideas including manipulation and passing sequences but he needs to bring them into a cornerstone of his game.
Time in the WHL, and especially in the locker room and on the ice with 2026 Eligible Gavin McKenna, should help him find these ideas and round out his potentially dominant game.
Offensively, Cayden Lindstrom’s primary weapon is his shot. The rest of his game revolves around it. He finds dangerous areas of the ice and shoots from there quite often (he scored 27 goals in 32 games). In-zone and on the powerplay, he’s primarily stationed netfront. As much as that’s an important place to create from, it could also have limited some of his capacity to creat in those situations.
It’s hard to see an NHL coach asking him to move from the net-front but it’s possible there’s more room for him to take control in-zone.
In terms of xG/60 and xA1/60, Cayden Lindstrom (the crude red dot on the graph) compares most with Gabe Perrault and Andrei Svechnikov. He was a higher volume creator than recent high picks in Shane Wright, Logan Cooley, Cutter Gauthier and Ryan Leonard but doesn’t quite match up to the pure offense of now mega-star Matthew Tkachuk.
While his shot is his best weapon, he’s also found high danger passing to complement his skills and enhance his threat potential. While he’s not exactly a manipulative play architect (low Walk-in Assists/60) and prefers to shoot (Rush Shots/60 vs Rush Shot Assists/60), he uses the space that he creates to find high-danger passes quite frequently (Rush Slot Passes/60, Rush xA1/60).
The most important stat for understanding Cayden Lindstrom is his xG Buildup/60. This is a highly advanced stat (built similarly to research from Thibaud Chatel) that factors in his capacity to make offensive possessions consistently more dangerous.
I could talk about the beauty and intricacy of these models for a long time but essentially the metric puts a number to his capacity to create possession in the first place, his capacity to get the puck off the wall and to transition across the ice while using the center lane.
Along the right side of the chart, you can see the factors that are built into the total metric. Cayden Lindstrom was the highest performer in Mitch Brown’s tracked data set.
There are some qualifications and caveats. He’s bigger and stronger than his Junior competition and he plays with another talented teammate in Andrew Basha (along with Gavin McKenna). Still, he came out ranked 1st.
With time, he will be able to translate that athletic advantage to the NHL as well but it will be dramatically diminished.
Furthermore, this data isn’t adjusted for league. Macklin Celebrini put up similar xG Buildup results but did so against dramatically more difficult competition. It would be foolish to think Lindstrom would have created the same advantages in his place.
Filtering out Lindstrom’s offensive tracking data reveals an excellent and well-rounded player. He isn’t a premier cross-lane passer in transition, he doesn’t create turnovers in the neutral zone too often, but otherwise he doesn’t have an real weaknesses.
He generates a tremendous amount of transition offense and is espeically good at using the center lane. He drives at the defense and creates entries, turns them into shooting lanes (off-puck assists/60) or cuts backs and finds passes (cutbacks & delays/60).
He uses his speed and handling ability to create spatial advantages (advantages for self/60) but is also very good at finding his teammates in those spaces as well (advantages for teammates/60). He uses his physicality to create space(body positioning) and uses a combination of skills to turn pucks on the wall into inside possession (cycle escapes to inside/60).
All-in-all, this is an incredibly complete player who only needs to up his decision-making pace and learn to create off his teammates more. He showed flashes of increasing his pace and working with his teammates as well, so there’s plenty of room to believe in his continued development.
This is a player who was drafted for plenty of reasons but his development trajectory was certainly one of them. He only moved to center very recently and was barely on the radar as a prospect in his Draft-1. He’s improving at a rapid pace.
If he’s allowed proper time to cook and the Blue Jackets may have a formidable center-corps.
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