We are back with our 2025 mid-season edition of our CanucksArmy top 20 Vancouver Canucks prospect rankings.

If you are curious about our ranking criteria, check them out in our HM installment.

Number 8 is…

Team: Brampton Steelheads | Age: 19 | Position: Left Wing | Height: 6’6″ | Weight: 234 lbs | Shoots: Left | Drafted: Fourth round, 107 overall, 2023 | Last year’s rank: 11

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more intriguing fourth-round prospect out there. After all, 6-foot-6, 234-pound (you read that right) 19-year-olds don’t grow on trees. In fact, at 6-foot-6, he practically is a tree.

It’s especially rare to find those with soft hands and a nose for the net.

If you weren’t a die-hard prospects follower, perhaps you weren’t familiar with the brand of hockey that this mid-round draftee has brought to the table since being drafted in 2023. But if you tuned in for the Canucks’ 2024 training camp and pre-season, the chances are that he is all over your radar now.

He kicked off his 2024 fall at Young Stars, where he shared the tournament lead in points, boosting his team to a perfect 3-0 tournament record. From there, he brought that poise to main camp, where he stood out (no pun intended) among the top brass and even slotted into a pair of NHL pre-season games. It was in those games that he solidified himself as a future fan-favourite.

He combined for six hits across two games in just 19:15 minutes of ice time and even dropped the gloves against a seasoned 30-year-old NHL scrapper, John Hayden. After laying out Seattle Kraken depth forward Logan Morrison, Alriksson answered the bell and accepted his fate. He did just fine.

“I want to use my body and play physical and if somebody challenges me, I’ll accept it,” said Alriksson after the game. “I had a better reach than him (Hayden) with longer arms. It was a good fight. I always want to finish my hits and play my best.”

It was a big leap for the 19-year-old, who showed that his incredible frame was on the right track to develop into the player this organization’s amateur scouting team had a hunch he could be – not to mention the perfect “Tocchet type” for the future.

That strong audition earned him an entry-level contract before he returned to the OHL to skate in his sophomore season among his peers.

“Vilmer had a solid training camp and continues to develop and improve,” Patrik Allvin said in a statement released by the team. “We really like his size, skating ability and skillset, and we will continue to monitor his progress and work with him this year to help Vilmer get ready to take another step forward in his hockey career.”

Back in the Ontario League, he was placed into a tough spot on a very weak Guelph Storm squad, where they lost nine of their first 10 games of the season. You couldn’t tell by looking at his stat line, though, as he put up 11 goals and 23 points in just 26 games to finish as a near-point-per-game player by the Christmas break.

But the Storm used that to their advantage as they went through a clean sweep of the group, trading away their farm for the future. That resulted in the big Swede landing in Brampton, where he joined potential top-5 pick Porter Martone and Kraken prospect Carson Rehkopf.

Unfortunately, it’s been a bit of an odd and slow transition for Alriksson. Despite maintaining the same usage and playing mostly top-line and powerplay, navigating a new system has led to a slight dip in production. He’s still up to 11 points in 17 games, giving him a new career high of 34 points in just 43 games, but he’s struggled to thrive fully within his new system.

It’s not for lack of effort, though. We mentioned the soft hands earlier, and by gosh, does he ever. Watching Vilmer navigate the ice is a treat, and he uses his incredible reach and strength to weave in and out of traffic. Honestly, watching him dance around opponents and creating space for him and his teammates is immensely satisfying.

More important is his competitive nature and incredibly sizable edge. Aside from the hits and being on the positive end of one-on-one battles, the most impressive area of his game is what he does on the boards. As a Canuck follower, you are constantly reminded of the endorsements of being a successful board battler, and no one does it quite like Vilmer.

There’s a good chance that he may very well be too physically mature for the Junior ranks.

With 67 points, split evenly with 32 goals and 35 assists across 110 OHL games, he’s unlikely to become an offensive dynamo as he jumps the ranks. But he mixes in a nice dual-threat ability and can score goals from both distance and tight – mostly in tight. He combines that with soft hands and incredible size, all of which are guaranteed to leave a head coach like Rick Tocchet with a smile.

Ceiling: Considering that Alriksson is a fourth-round project, we do our best not to get too carried away with regard to his ceiling. There’s still a long road ahead for him to realize any said potential. Yet, with the unique mixture of size, skating ability, hands and creativity, you can almost picture him standing at the front on an NHL power play. We look at players such as Alexei Protas in Washington, who has broken out at 24 years old, and St. Louis’ Alexei Toropchenko, who we can’t help but figure Alriksson’s ceiling lies somewhere in between the two. He’s got top-nine ceiling written all over him.

Floor: We should see how he transitions soon, but without seeing that, his floor remains as open as an AHL player to an SHL mainstay.

ETA: He’ll be 20 on February 19th, and his ELC has already been signed. We expect him to transition to the pro ranks this spring, where he’ll likely spend the next two years developing in Abbotsford, with the potential to see call-ups as early as next spring (2026). If a full-time NHL deployment is, in fact, on the docket, respect that it should be around the 2027-28 campaign.