Can 2026 NHL Draft prospect Xavier Villeneuve be the next Lane Hutson?

Alexandre Jacques’ first season as head coach of the Blainville-Boisbriand Armada was just getting started, and he’d decided to bring in a few of the team’s alumni for a practice. Among them were former NHLers Joel Teasdale (at the time playing in Austria), 27, and Philippe Maillet (at the time playing in Switzerland), 33. The two veteran pros couldn’t get the puck off one current player: Xavier Villeneuve. When Jacques tells that story months later, he refers to it as “just one example” of the kind of first impression Villeneuve can leave. “There’s no doubt that he’s got a special gift,” Jacques said. “He’s really dynamic.” That dynamic player, however, is also described by NHL scouts as one of the 2026 NHL Draft’s most polarizing prospects. The one pole: He was named to the CHL’s All-Rookie Team in 2023-24 after he registered 43 points in 54 games as a young 16-year-old in the Q (his late-September birthday makes him old for this year’s draft but made him one of the league’s youngest players that year) and the QMJHL’s Defenceman of the Year in 2024-25 after he registered 62 points in 61 games. He won a gold medal with Team Canada at the 2025 U18 worlds, where he led all D in the tournament with four goals. To start his draft year, he registered 22 points in his first 14 games of this season and was one of the first three players named to Team CHL’s roster for the CHL USA Prospects Challenge. There, he was also named an alternate captain. The other pole: He’s a 5-foot-10.75, 164-pound D who draws criticism from scouts for how hard he defends. He also dealt with hip issues this season, which he told The Athletic aren’t major and were “nothing that anybody would operate on,” but that some teams do wonder about and kept him off the ice to start his offseason as he continued his rehab. And he didn’t have the season many expected he would, finishing with 30 points in his final 40 regular-season and playoff games after that hot start and missing all of January, February and most of March due to the injury. The former is reason to bet on him in the draft. The latter raises the question of how early it would be prudent to do so. Maxim Noreau, himself an undersized offensive defenseman, began working with Villeneuve after he retired from his 17-year career spanning the NHL, AHL and Swiss NL, and was hired as a skills coach for the Armada just as Villeneuve was coming into the league as their first-round pick (No. 7 overall) in the 2023 QMJHL draft. They’ve worked together for three years now, both in season in his once-a-week role with the Armada and in the offseason through weekly skates he started running for him after meeting his dad and the work he does with Villeneuve’s agency, Quartexx, in the Montreal area, often skating him with his pro guys. He’ll also send him video and notes over the course of the season. The first time he got on the ice with him in Blainville, though, he had never heard of Villeneuve. In one of the very first drills he ran the players through, Villeneuve did it his own way. Then he watched him go through the circuit again and do it another way. At the time, Noreau didn’t know how he felt about it. Years later, he told people with Hockey Canada about it, and they said WHL exceptional-status D Landon DuPont was like that at one of their camps, too: a drill changer. “I joke around with him a lot that I can’t even use some of the drills I use because he’s not even doing the drill the way I want it, but it’s hard to get mad at him because he’s doing it so well,” Noreau said. Noreau has simply tried to help him as much as possible with balance. “Like with any young player, it’s going to be a learning curve. But the high-end skill is undeniable. The best way I can describe it, if we’re just going to talk about the pure skill or creativity, is that it’s what we see in a Hutson or a Hughes,” Noreau said. “And not that I’m comparing him to them — they’re on another planet and if he wants to get there he’s got a lot of work to do — but let’s just say that he has the opportunity because of just how creative he is.” Jacques describes Villeneuve’s draft year in three parts. There was the first month and a half where he was “really good.” There was the time between the QMJHL top prospects game and the injury, when he felt he tried to do too much. And then there was the end of the regular season and into the playoffs, where he started to find that balance again, but was also working his way back from injury. “He wanted to be a difference-maker for our team, and he has that at his heart and for him to be a difference-maker was offensively,” Jacques said. “But when he’s going to get to the next level — and I know he’s going to mature and understand it — and you’re playing against the best players in the world, it’s not going to happen every shift that you do a highlight play and what’s most important is to defend and then the offense is going to come no matter what with the skill he’s got.” Noreau said there were times a year ago when Villeneuve would get down on himself when another guy was put out first on the power play or late in a game, not because he was a bad teammate (all those The Athletic spoke to for this story praised his enthusiasm for hockey, his teammates and life) but because he’d think “Man, I want to get out there, I’m supposed to be the guy.” This year, his short-term memory took a “big step.” Noreau thinks both the comparisons to the Hutsons and the critics who don’t think he’ll be them will drive him, too. “(They’re) hard to live up to, but he knows he has a lot of work to do,” Noreau said. “And defensively, especially when you’re that size, it’s always going to be the knock on you, but there’s ways to defend at that size against bigger guys, especially when you’re as creative as he is. You see these Hutsons now, and they’re getting away with it just by having great feet and great sticks or even being able to recover if you do get beat. The upside, especially offensively, is huge.” Talk to Villeneuve, and he speaks with excitement and confidence. He sees himself as a defenseman who has “the skills and the skating to be great offensively.” But he also says “the compete level is there too” and believes he can “also be great defensively.” His competitiveness drives him. “Whenever I’m on the ice, I want to be a game-changer, I want to make the difference. That’s a big part of my identity on the ice,” he said. Ask him about where he comes from, and he’ll eagerly tell you he was raised in Rimouski and moved at 8 to the Montreal borough of LaSalle. His dad, Alexandre, is a marketing director at Pepsi who still plays beer league (Villeneuve has been known to play in those games from time to time). His older brother, Charles-Olivier, is a forward at Concordia University. Growing up, they would go at it on the outdoor rink and in the basement. And Villeneuve is quick to point out that his dad is tall, so he thinks he has an inch or two coming as well. “A lot of people can say this, but my dad grew at 19 years old from 5-11 to 6-2, so I’m not worried about that,” he said. He’s not shy to make the Hutson comparable, either. Though he didn’t grow up a Canadiens fan (Villeneuve was a Bruins fan), he’s a Lane fan and has watched him closely in Montreal. The Hutsons were the driving force behind his decision to commit to Boston University for next season. (Though he was sold when, on a winter recruiting trip, the Terriers’ staff ended up in a ditch, pulled themselves out, and kept on their way to see him.) He also knows he can be even better, too. “I think it was decent. Not really good but not atrocious,” he said of his draft year. “But I don’t think that I’ve reached my game yet that I had at the start of the year. I’m pretty confident that next year I’ll come back to 100 percent.” Terriers head coach Jay Pandolfo and his coaching staff are excited about the opportunity to help him reach that. “He reminds me a lot of guys we’ve had here the last couple of years, one being in Montreal and one now in Washington,” Pandolfo said on a recent phone call, chuckling. “He’s got a lot of offensive tools. He can really skate. He’s creative. His hockey IQ is very high. His competitiveness is very high. He’s got quite the package.” Both Pandolfo and Kim Brandvold, who runs BU’s defense, felt in particular that his competitiveness and passion for the game were similar to the Hutsons and both things that actually separate Villeneuve. Pandolfo thinks he’ll bring some life to their group off the ice and some creativity to their group on it. “With Lane, it took guys a little bit of time to get used to playing with him and have an understanding that you have to be ready all the time because he sees things that you don’t and maybe you don’t realize that you’re in a good spot for him. So, guys are going to have to adapt to Xavier, too, but a lot of times those players make people around them better, and I think Xavier has that ability,” Pandolfo said. They’re confident he’ll get stronger working with their strength and conditioning team as well. And that doesn’t necessarily mean just adding a bunch of weight, either. The still-light Hutsons didn’t. “I don’t think Lane put on a ton of size. But he’s hockey strong,” Pandolfo said. “And I see the same things with Xavier. Their balance they have on the ice, their understanding of leverage and all of those things, I think Xavier already has some of that, but he can also take advantage of the time he’s going to have to work off of the ice. And you have to use your brain, use your angles, use your stick, and those are some of the things that Lane got really good at defensively in his two years here, and we’ll work on similar things with Xavier. But I don’t see major issues.” While Villeneuve didn’t participate in the agility testing or the 10-metre sprint at the NHL Scouting Combine as he nurses his hips back to full health, he finished fourth in horizontal jump (115 inches), second in VO2max output, and tied for 10th in vertical jump (21.9 inches). None of that came as any surprise to those who know him. “Even if he does something wild and people are like ‘wow, that’s amazing,’ I’m like ‘No, I’ve seen that 50 times.’ You just need that confidence and that swag to actually go out and try it, which he has,” Noreau said. — With reporting in Buffalo, N.Y., and Calgary and Lethbridge, Alberta