Cole Caufield

Last Season

Fifty-one goals and 88 points in 81 games on 258 shots, plus-29, eleven on the power play. Fifty goals from a player this size, in this era, is a genuinely rare thing.

The Finesse Game

The shot is the entire argument and it is one of the two or three best in the league. It is not the heaviest — it is the quickest. He changes the puck’s angle with his hands rather than his feet and releases it before a goaltender has finished setting, from spots where nobody is expecting a shot to come.

The other half is where he goes. He finds the soft ice between a defenceman and a winger, holds still while the play develops, and appears at the back post at the exact moment the seam opens. That is a learned skill and he has gotten better at it every season.

He is not a playmaker and does not pretend to be. Thirty-seven assists on a line with a hundred-point centre is about right.

The Physical Game

Five-eight and 175, and there is no physical component to his game at all. Fourteen penalty minutes in a full season describes a player who never engages. He is removed from pucks along the wall by anyone who tries, and he does not go to the interior except to shoot.

That has to be accepted rather than fixed. He scores fifty goals; nobody needs him to win a battle.

The Intangibles

Drafted fifteenth because of his size after scoring at a rate nobody had matched in college, and he has spent six years proving the size was the wrong thing to worry about.

He has played 83 percent of his minutes with the same centre for years. That is the one dependency worth naming, and it is a very good problem.