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.Xavier Villeneuve on the ice at practice before the CHL USA Prospects Challenge. (Jenn Pierce / CHL)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.