Bruins spotlight USHL star Will Zellers' rise with Green Bay Gamblers

Will Zellers brought the clearest USHL case to Boston’s development camp, and the Bruins made sure that part of his rise stayed front and center. The 20-year-old forward, acquired from Colorado in the Charlie Coyle trade on March 7, 2025, arrived with a Green Bay Gamblers season that put him on the NHL radar and made him one of the league’s most decorated players of 2024-25.

Zellers played 52 regular-season games for Green Bay and produced 44 goals and 27 assists, then added one goal and two assists in two playoff games. He led the USHL in goals and points per game despite missing 10 games, and he finished with a league-leading 214 shots and a 20.6 percent shooting rate. The USHL named him Forward of the Year and Player of the Year, and USA Hockey later added the Dave Tyler National Junior Player of the Year award to his profile. For Green Bay, it was the first time a player from the franchise won the USHL Forward of the Year honor.

That junior-season production now sits alongside a draft and trade path that keeps him in the Boston pipeline. Colorado selected Zellers 76th overall in the third round of the 2024 NHL Draft, then sent him to the Bruins in the deal that also brought back Casey Mittelstadt and a 2025 second-round pick. Boston’s interest in what Zellers learned in the USHL is as important as the raw scoring totals: Green Bay gave him a season of heavy minutes, repeated puck touches and the kind of workload that forced his game to sharpen before he reached the next level.

The Bruins’ camp feature also tied Zellers to Cooper Simpson, another third-round pick and a future University of North Dakota teammate. The two forwards had already spent part of the summer training together in Minnesota, took the same flight to Boston and were sitting side by side at Warrior Ice Arena as they talked through the move from development camp to college hockey. That familiarity matters in a setting built on rapid evaluation. Boston is not only watching skill; it is looking at how quickly prospects communicate, adapt and start building the habits that carry from junior hockey to the NCAA and beyond.

Simpson, selected in the third round of the 2025 NHL Draft, had planned to play one more USHL season with the Tri-City Storm before heading to North Dakota for 2026-27. For Zellers, the Green Bay season now looks like the bridge that made the UND transition feel less like a leap and more like a continuation.

The USHL keeps pushing that pathway as its signature selling point, noting that more than half of Division I men’s hockey roster spots are held by league alumni and that more than 195 alumni were listed on NHL rosters at the start of the 2024-25 season. Zellers is now one more example of how the league can turn a scoring title into a faster track to Boston and North Dakota.