Jack Hughes

Last Season

Twenty-seven goals and 50 assists in 61 games — 77 points, even in plus-minus, at 21:19 a night. Twenty-one games missed. Ten penalty minutes all season.

The Finesse Game

The skating is the best in this book and it is not an argument. He accelerates in two strides, he changes direction at full speed without losing the puck, and defencemen who close on him find the gap has already moved.

The passing is the equal of it. Fifty assists in 61 games, most made at a pace nobody else on the ice is playing at.

The shot has become genuinely good: 306 unblocked attempts, 27 goals, median 24 feet with 37 per cent from inside twenty. He used to defer; he no longer does.

The Physical Game

Five foot eleven and 175 pounds, and it is the whole of the risk. Ten penalty minutes in 61 games — he is never in anything. He avoids contact by design and is genuinely hard to hit, which works until a series where somebody makes it the plan.

Twenty-one games missed, and this is not the first season of that.

The Intangibles

Fifty-four point six per cent of the expected goals, 85th percentile, with the chances 51.0 to 42.4 in his favour — and the actual goals 29 for and 38 against.

That is a twenty-goal hole, and it is the whole New Jersey season. The club scored 136 five-on-five goals against 173.9 expected, the worst finishing in the league by a distance.

Nineteen points in his last ten games, eight of them goals. He is 25 and the best player on this roster by some way. Almost nothing on his record last season describes him.