Ryan Nugent-Hopkins

This Season So Far

The 2026-27 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

20 goals and 56 points in 72 games, 11 of the goals on the power play, and a minus-9 that says more about where he was deployed than about how he played. He passed 1,000 career games along the way.

The Finesse Game

The hands are quiet and very good. His best work comes from the half-wall on the power play, where he holds the puck just long enough to move a penalty killer and then puts it through the lane that killer has vacated. The pass across to the far circle is his signature, and he throws it flat and hard enough to be one-timed.

At even strength he is a connector. He is the player who takes a bad pass in his feet, settles it, and turns a broken zone entry into a possession. None of that shows up anywhere except in the fact that lines with him on them keep the puck.

He plays center or the left side without a drop-off, which is why he has spent a decade being moved around to fix whatever is broken that month. He kills penalties, takes the draw, and has made himself genuinely trustworthy in his own end — none of which anyone projected when he went 1st overall. Trustworthy there is not the same as sent there: 56.9 per cent of his five-on-five shifts started in the attacking zone, the 78th percentile.

The Physical Game

Slight, and always has been. Listed at 192 and does not play heavier than that. He is not going to win a wall battle against a real defenseman, so he does not try one — he wins pucks with his stick, his angles and his timing, and he is harder to knock off balance than the frame suggests.

He blocks shots and takes hits to make plays. He does not hit.

The Intangibles

15 years in one place, most of them on teams that were bad before they were good, and he has taken every role the club has needed without a word about it: first-line center, third-line center, McDavid’s winger, penalty killer. That kind of flexibility usually gets called selfless and undervalued. Both are true here.

He is no longer quick enough to drive his own line against top competition. He is still a better hockey player at 33 than he was at 23, which is not something you get to say about many first-overall picks.