Jacob Battaglia may not have been the loudest name at Rangers development camp last week, but the 20-year-old forward keeps popping up in ways that make him hard to ignore.
He came to New York in the trade deadline deal with the Calgary Flames in March, a move that sent Brennan Othmann the other way. That alone would have been enough to bury Battaglia under the usual prospect buzz, but the Rangers kept adding bigger names around him.
Liam Greentree arrived from the Los Angeles Kings when Artemi Panarin went west, and later Cole Beaudoin came over from the Utah Mammoth in the Vincent Trocheck trade. Both were former first-round picks, and both drew more attention than Battaglia did.
Still, the people who have seen Battaglia up close insist there’s real substance here.
“First of all, he’s an amazing human being,” Rangers prospect Nathan Aspinall told reporters at development camp. “And he’s probably the most creative player I’ve ever played with.
Just the plays he makes, sometimes you just have to scratch your head. So, yeah, he’s unreal.”
Aspinall knows him well. The two were teammates and linemates in Flint of the OHL last season after the Firebirds got Battaglia from Kingston. Aspinall was the bigger breakout story there, piling up a career-high 94 points to finish second in the OHL, so it was easy for Battaglia to get lost in the noise even though he was taken three rounds and 97 picks later in the 2024 draft.
But Battaglia has his own case to make. Calgary picked the 6-foot-1, 196-pound forward at No. 62 overall in that draft, and he’s coming into his first pro season with a track record that keeps growing.
In his draft year with Kingston, he scored 31 goals and finished with 65 points in 67 games. The next season, he jumped to 40 goals and 90 points.
After the move to Flint last season, his numbers dipped - 48 points with 26 goals and 22 assists in 64 games across two OHL teams - but his role expanded and his game rounded out.
“I think I play an almost complete game. One of the steps I’m still working on is figuring out the D zone a little bit.
I think I made some pretty big improvements this year,” he explained last week. “I like to think I’m pretty smart with the puck and make the right play in the right situations.
I like to shoot, I like to pass. I just love hockey, I guess.”
The biggest wrinkle in Battaglia’s profile is the one that could make him even more interesting to the Rangers: he moved to center after the trade to Flint. That matters in a system that doesn’t have a ton of depth down the middle, and it matters even more after the Trocheck trade, with Mika Zibanejad and J.T. Miller both entering their age-33 season.
“I’ve been a winger-man my whole life, either playing left or right, so when I got that shift to center-man, it was a whole new world of hockey. I never really had any experience playing down the middle,” Battaglia explained.
“I really liked it because I felt that I could really use my speed more and attack with my speed instead of being flatfooted on the wall. … I’m pretty excited to get the chance to keep that up.”
That center experiment also put him on a line with Aspinall and Darian Anderson, who the Rangers took in the sixth round at No. 163 overall in this year’s draft. Battaglia said Anderson was so important to that Flint group that the line assignments became a small battle of their own.
“We used to have to fight over who’s line he was on, pretty much, that’s how valuable he was to the lineup,” Battaglia said about Anderson. “And Nathan, I’m sure you all know how skilled and how smart he is with the puck. So, those guys made my life pretty easy when I was playing alongside them.”
If Battaglia stays at center, he’ll be part of a group the Rangers are looking to develop at Hartford this season, alongside Beaudoin, Dylan Roobroeck, Carey Terrance and possibly Brody Lamb. Noah Laba, who is soon to be 23 and enters his second NHL season this fall, sits ahead of that group.
Beaudoin is the top center prospect in the system. But Battaglia has made enough noise to stay in the conversation. Don’t sleep on him.
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