Nathan Aspinall didn’t just have a good season for Flint. He turned it into a full-blown breakout and shoved himself into the Rangers’ prospect conversation in a hurry.
A year ago, he wasn’t ranked at all. Now he sits at No. 6 in The Athletic’s Rangers prospect rankings after a 2025-26 OHL campaign that changed the way people around the league talk about him. The 6-foot-7, left-shot winger finished second in the OHL with 94 points - 33 goals and 41 assists - in 65 games, then tacked on 17 more points in eight playoff games, including four goals in a second-round series against Windsor.
Flint coach Paul Flache saw the shift up close, and one early-season moment told him plenty about what was coming. After a loss, he walked into an empty locker room and then heard the sounds of the team in a nearby workout room.
“I went in there, and it was (Nathan Aspinall) who was leading the charge with the entire team,” Flache recently told The Athletic. “I called my GM (Dave McParlan) after and I said, ‘We’re going to be just fine this year.'”
He was right. The Firebirds went 44-17-4-3, the highest win total in the franchise’s 10-year history, and swept Owen Sound in the first round before falling to Windsor. Aspinall was central to all of it as captain and top scorer, putting together the kind of final junior season that made his draft slot look a lot smarter in hindsight.
New York took him in the fifth round, No. 159 overall, in the 2024 draft. Before that, his path looked a lot less certain. He was a healthy scratch 39 times during his 2022-23 rookie OHL season, and even after Flache arrived the next year, Aspinall was still more projection than certainty.
“His skill set was always there,” Flache said. “He’s a big man, rangy, very good puck skills, very, very good vision - and so you knew over time, he was going to grow into his body.
… Those summers, you see them go from a boy to a man sometimes. That’s what we noticed, was just when he came to camp, he had grown up and matured, and the confidence grew from year to year.”
That growth showed in the numbers. Aspinall posted 34 points in 2023-24, then 47 in 2024-25 before nearly doubling that output in his final OHL season. Marty Williamson, the general manager of the Barrie Colts, said he saw the talent but not necessarily this kind of leap.
“He was kind of gangly early and not as coordinated, (but) he just kept getting better and better,” Williamson said. “I didn’t think he was going to have the kind of year that he had in his final year.
I liked him but I always kind of went, ‘Yeah, he’s a player in the league and is going to be a long (term) project.’ And he took a big, big step last year.”
At the end of it all, Aspinall became a 207-pound problem for OHL defenders. Williamson put it plainly: “If he got in front of you, there was no way to get him.”
There’s still a real developmental question hanging over his game as he moves toward the pro level. Aspinall is expected to start this season with AHL Hartford, where the Rangers want to see how his offense translates when he isn’t driving everything the way he did in Flint.
Flache knows the assignment will change.
“He’s going to have to make sure he’s getting pucks out, finishing his checks, and being more of that role player and not getting scored on, whereas we relied on him to produce a lot of offense,” Flache said. “That’s just going to be different.”
That said, the offensive package is obvious. Aspinall played heavy minutes for Flint, often up to 25 a night, and spent much of his season on a puck-heavy line with Los Angeles Kings prospect Jimmy Lombardi and New York’s 2026 sixth-round pick, Darian Anderson. His quick release, puck protection and vision made him dangerous, and his size only amplified the effect.
“My favorite thing about him is his vision and his puck skills,” Flache said. “A lot of guys have a hard time looking up with the puck on their stick.
They keep looking down, but from day one, that was one of his best skills. … Then you combine that with being 6-foot-7 and the reach that he has to hold onto pucks (and) extend plays in the offensive zone, that’s a separator for me.”
Anderson put it another way: “At his height, with how skilled he is and the way he skates, like, that shouldn’t really be possible,” added Anderson.
The Rangers also spent time this past season checking in on the parts of Aspinall’s game that will matter most as he climbs. Flache said those conversations centered on the details he’ll need if he’s going to become more than just a scoring winger.
Still, the person behind the player seems to be a big part of why people around Flint believe he’ll keep finding a way.
“He was there first every day to make sure that he was welcoming everybody, and also leading by example,” Flache said. “That’s his makeup and his personality.”
If the early returns are any indication, that same approach is now carrying Aspinall from junior standout to one of the Rangers’ most intriguing prospects.
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