Cutter Gauthier

Last Season

Forty-one goals and 28 assists in 76 games — 69 points at 22, in his second full season. Two hundred and eighty-five shots on goal, which is a shooter’s volume, at 14.4 per cent.

The Finesse Game

The release is the skill. It is quick and it is disguised, and it goes in from distances that should not work: the median unblocked attempt of his season came from 34 feet out, and nearly a third of them from beyond forty. Only 23 per cent came from inside twenty feet. Forty-goal scorers are usually built the other way round.

That is worth stating plainly because it cuts both ways. A shot that beats goaltenders from 40 feet is a real weapon and he has clearly got one. It is also the shot most likely to stop going in — distance shooting carries more luck in it than tap-ins do, and the expected-goals model liked his season a good deal less than the scoresheet did.

The skating is strong and straight-line. He gets to his spot and he fires.

The Physical Game

Six foot two, 205, and willing enough along the wall, though he is not going to win a game by being difficult to play against. Twenty-eight penalty minutes in 76 games is a player who stays out of the traffic.

The Intangibles

The fifth pick in 2022, traded before he ever played for the club that drafted him, and now the leading goal scorer on a young team that badly needed one. He was minus-two on a roster that was collectively much worse than that, and the shot attempts went 54.7 per cent his way — 89th percentile.

The honest question is the shooting percentage. If it holds, he is a star. If it settles back toward ten per cent, he is a thirty-goal winger who needs a playmaker, and this club will have to find him one.