Sebastian Aho

Last Season

Twenty-seven goals and 53 assists in 79 games — 80 points, plus-11, at 19:37 a night. His tenth NHL season and his 711th career point.

The Finesse Game

The complete forward, and the passing is the best part. Fifty-three assists from a centre who is also the club’s defensive conscience is a remarkable division of labour, and the good ones are the seam feeds he makes at speed with a man on his back.

The shot is heavy and used well: 314 unblocked attempts, 34 per cent of them inside twenty feet, median 29, and 27 went in. He is not a pure finisher and never has been; he is the man who makes the finisher’s chance.

The Physical Game

Six foot even, 189, and he plays a hard, irritating game without ever being a punisher. Forty-six penalty minutes. He wins pucks with his stick and his angles, and he backchecks like the game is tied.

The Intangibles

He was on the ice for 61.7 per cent of the shot attempts — the hundredth percentile in the league — and 56.5 per cent of the expected goals, 94th, in more than a thousand minutes of the hardest available assignment.

That is not a system effect alone. Every Hurricane posted extraordinary possession numbers and Aho posted the best of the forwards while playing against the other team’s best line every night.

He is 29. Nine points in his last ten. Carolina scored seventeen five-on-five goals fewer than its chances were worth last season, and the man generating a good share of those chances has an eighty-point season to show for it. On any other roster it reads like a hundred.