The Top 25 Under 25 is a collaboration by members of the Die By The Blade community. It was a combination of six staff writers and over 485 fans that ranked players under the age of 25 as of August 10, 2021. Each participant used their own metric of current ability and production to rank each player.
Make no mistake, throughout his entire career with the Buffalo Sabres, Tage Thompson is going to be measured by the yardstick that he came over in the Ryan O’Reilly trade, and short of winning the Conn Smythe Trophy, he will always be found short.
Now that we have put that aside, let’s take a look at how he did last season. On a floundering Sabres team, Thompson actually had some decent games last season and ended up eight highest in scoring among all forwards with most of those points coming at even strength. However, he also spent good chunks of time as a healthy scratch, so it’s not all roses.
Thompson was widely expected to be either a throw-in on a trade involving one of the Sabres big guns or else targeted by the Seattle Kraken for the expansion draft this summer, but neither has materialized and while he still has two more seasons under contract, this is looking a lot like a career-making or breaking season for the player.
The forward has all the physical tools needed to be successful at this level, but the time for him to get it all together from a mental perspective is running out fast.
#25 Casey Fitzgerald
#24 Aaron Huglen
#23 Linus Weissbach
#22 Aleksandr Kisakov
#21 Albert Lyckåsen
#20 Erik Portillo
#19 Devon Levi
#18 Matej Pekar
#17 Oskari Laaksonen
#16 Isak Rosen
#15 Jacob Bryson
#14 Ryan Johnson
#13 Mattias Samuelsson