Flames rookie, Matthew Coronato may be the most underappreciated player in the 2023-24 Series One Young Guns class
Hockey card collectors got a nice surprise when Upper Deck announced an early release for its flagship Series One set. Typically, the hobby has to wait until mid-November to dive into one of the hobbies most anticipated sets of the year. However, the product is ready for distribution and will be available to the public on October 18th.
Series One is always a fun product to rip into as it contains the highly coveted Young Guns rookie cards of the league's top freshmen. So when the checklist dropped last week I was excited to check it out and see which top rookies I should be hunting.
In this five-part series, I will be ranking the top five chase cards in the set.
The second player in this series I am going to highlight is card #201 Matthew Coranato
Nicknamed ‘The Bull,’ Coronato was drafted by the Calgary Flames in the first round of the 2021 NHL Entry Draft. The stocky yet tenacious winger spent two seasons developing in the NCAA with Harvard University where he lit the lamp 38 times in 68 contests.
Unfortunately, he was only able to get into one NHL game last season where he went pointless and finished a dash-two. But a strong preseason has put him on the radar of most Young Gun collectors.
Coronato starting camp with a ‘bang’ by netting his first hat trick in a Flames uniform in their preseason opener against the Canucks. He went on to finish the preseason top-five league-wide with seven points.
The expectation is for Coronato to start the year on the third line for the Flames next to Mikael Backlund and Blake Coleman. However, what’s more encouraging to see is that the 20-year-old appears to have earned himself a look on the top power-play unit. That’s a great way to put up points and raise the demand for his Young Guns
Plus, he continues to fill the net and produce the way he did in the preseason, there’s definitely room to move up in the lineup to play alongside Nazem Kadri, Jonathon Huberdeau, or Elias Lindholm. So there’s a lot to be excited about when it comes to the potential of Coronato and what that could mean for the desirability of his Young Guns.
Surprisingly, eBay presales for this Young Guns are cheaper than the rest of the cards in this series at an affordable $38 CAD.
Good value for one of the better rookies in the class.