We are starting to get into the top young players in the Pittsburgh Penguins organization, and we continue today with one of the three first-round picks from the 2025 NHL Draft, forward Will Horcoff as he comes off a monster season at the University of Michigan.
Pensburgh Top 25 Under 25: Graduates and Departed players in 2025 Top 25 Under 25: The best of the rest #25: Chase Pietila #24: Ryan Miller #23: Finn Harding #22: Peyton Kettles #21: Zam Plante #21: Brady Peddle #20: Melvin Fernstrom #19:
Tanner Howe #18: Tomas Galvas #17: Pierce Mbuyi #16: Jake Livanavage #15: Owen Pickering #14: Tristan Broz #13: Avery Hayes #12: Ville Koivunen #11: Hendrix Lapierre #10: Markus Ruck #9: Mikhail Ilyin #8: Joel Blomqvist #7: Liam Ruck
#6: Will Horcoff, RW
2025 Ranking: #5
Age: 19 (January 23, 2007)
Acquired Via: 2025 NHL Draft, 1st round, 24th overall
Height/Weight: 6’5”, 203 pounds
Elite Prospects resume:
If the Penguins are able to rebuild themselves into a contending team at any point in the near future, the 2025 NHL Draft class might be one of the biggest reasons why.
Even though the Penguins did not have a top-five pick that year, they still came away with three of the top-24 picks in the draft thanks to a series of trades, and they might come away with a couple of NHL players as a result.
They already look to have one NHL player in No. 11 overall pick Ben Kindel, while there is a lot of hope for picks No. 22 (Bill Zonnon) and No. 24 (Horcoff). The other two are still ahead in the top-25 under 25 rankings, and now Horcoff is the first of that group to appear on the list.
He does drop one spot from where he was a year ago, but do not take that as a sign of him regressing. It is actually a sign of the improvement within the Penguins farm system and how they actually have some real prospect depth at the moment. It is a night and day difference from where they were even just two years ago.
There was always a lot to like about Horcoff as a prospect, ranging from the fact he is the son of an NHL player (long-time NHL forward Shawn Horcoff), to his massive size, to the fact he is a smart player with a great defensive awareness. He had shown some flashes of goal production going into his draft year that he split between the U.S. National Development Team and the University of Michigan, and he really started to build on that during the 2025-26 season.
In his first full season at the NCAA level, Horcoff absolutely took off offensively, scoring 25 goals in 40 games. That goal total put him into a tie for second place in the entire country, trailing only the 29 goals scored by Dartmouth’s Hayden Stavroff.
That production really stood out to Penguins assistant general manager Jason Spezza, who had this to say about Horcoff’s emergence during the season.
Via The Athletic:
“We were attracted to the qualities that are giving him success now, so I’m not shocked, but I’m also pleasantly surprised,” Spezza said. “It’s a hard league to come into and do what he’s doing at that age. For a big man, he gets inside, but he also knows how to find the quiet areas in the slot. He’s got a nice release. He’s got a natural goal-scoring touch. And I just think he’s a student of the game. He spends a lot of time working on his game, thinking on his game and he’s benefiting from that.”
Along with the 25 goals in the NCAA, he also made the United States World Junior team and scored a goal with an assist in his five games at the tournament.
The big questions around Horcoff now become a matter of upside, and how repeatable his 2025-26 performance may have been.
The other aspects of his game (the size, the physical play, the defensive play) have always been there, and always gave him a chance to be an NHL player, at least in a depth role. But when he adds 25 goals in 40 games at the NCAA level to that package it starts to open your eyes a little bit more. It makes you think there might be a little more potential in there than “just a guy” at the next level.
But he has to show he can not only do that again, but also build on it.
If there’s a potential red flag or “prove it” thing with his performance, it’s that he went on an early season shooting bender that resulted in him scoring on more than 23 percent of shots for the season. That’s a high number. A really high number. And it might not be totally repeatable. The projection around him changes a lot if he’s not scoring goals at that rate on a consistent or even consistent basis.
He is going to have another year at the University of Michigan to prove himself and probably will not become a potential factor in the NHL until 2027-28. If he even comes close to repeating his 2025-26 performance offensively, the Penguins quickly go from having an intriguing prospect to having a very serious power forward prospect.
