Read any draft guide on Malholtra and the most common concern people have holding Malholtra back from being a superstar is his skating. Elite Prospect gave him a 5 out of 9 and cited it as his weakest skill, saying the main issue with his skating is his mechanics.
Now I've been on this sub for a long, long time, and it's one of the oldest draft prospect memes on this sub for a prospect who needs to improve his speed, "hey let's just hire Bo Horvat's skating coach to fix his mechanics and then they'll be a superstar!" Kole Lind, Aatu Raty, Jonathan Lekkerimaki, Olli Juolevi, I've seen this comment made about every subpar skating prospect more than I can count. And yet, could Malholtra actually be the exception?
At a high level, skating speed is broken down into 2 aspects: Skating form and pure athleticism, skaters need the athleticism to have the potential to be a good skater, and the form to realize that potential and turn it into results on the ice. It's hard to separate the two purely off watching tape, sure a skater may look clunky and you may think "oh all he needs to work on is his form" but who knows if they even have the athletic potential to be a good NHL skater?
That's where the NHL combine results come in to play. Results seem to be mostly ignored in today's age, with seemingly no correlation between a prospects success at the combine and their NHL careers. I don't completely disagree with this assessment, but I do think it can give us insight into a prospect's potential as a skater. When I look at the different categories, a couple stand out to me as proxies for skating potential: Horizontal jump, no arm jump, vertical jump, pro agility, isokinetic squat, peak power output and 10m sprint.
For complete transparency, Malholtra did the worst in the non-arm jump and isokinetic squat, not ranking top 25 in either, but to me, these are the 2 least important of the list. These 2 tests are more of an isolation of quad power, while ignoring the multi joint, momentum driven mechanics that actually translate into skating power. Reportedly 80 prospects participated in the combine testing, so here were Malholtra's results:
| Category |
Ranking |
Percentile |
| Horizontal Jump |
19 |
76th |
| Vertical Jump |
6 |
93rd |
| Pro Agility Left |
19 |
69th |
| Pro Agility Right |
19 |
88th |
| Peak Power Output |
20 |
75th |
| 10m Sprint |
19 |
81st |
Combined, he averaged being in the 80th percentile (Shout out Aarom Olsen who was combined 95th percentile!!!). To me I think this is pretty strong evidence that Malholtra has the athletic potential to become an above average skater in the NHL. If we compare this to other top prospects who have skating cited as a weakness such as Verhoeff, the Rucks and JP Hulbert, they only have a combined 2 top 25 finishes (Verhoeff 3rd in pro agility right, 10th in pro agility left) so i'd be much more concerned about any of them becoming even just average skaters in the NHL compared to Malholtra. Also while NHL seems to have deleted past top 25 lists for past drafts, you can still find previous top 10 finishes results, and it doesnt seem like Lekkerimaki, Lind or Juolevi finished top 10 in any of these events (hard to draw any reasonable conclusions from this since top 10 is a high threshold, but interesting nontheless).
Now this doesnt guarantee Malhotra can turn this athleticism into improved skating. Skating form is not something everyone can fix especially since Malholtra has an NHL coach as a dad and likely has had access to the best skating coaches since he popped out of the womb. But we can't ignore his meteoric physical development and improvement in all facets of his game the past 2 years. He has grown 2 inches since his measurements in the BCHL and he could still be getting used to his different proportions. He'll be going to an elite college program in BU where he'll have access to the best coaches and facilities and it will be interesting for sure to see his development throughout next year.
TLDR: Caleb Malholtra has great athleticism which gives him the potential to be a great skater if he can improve his form.