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listasi Rocket Richard trophyn suosikit.
1
. PATRIK LAINE, WINNIPEG JETS
It’s not just a matter of Laine progressing and Ovechkin regressing in his early 30s. It’s a matter of understanding just how sneaky-amazing Laine has been so far in his career. He debuted in the NHL at 18. Ovechkin did so at 20. So before we declare Laine off Ovechkin’s trajectory, let it soak in that Laine got 80 career goals before his 20th birthday. Ovechkin lost what could’ve been a teenage season because of the 2004-05 NHL lockout, so Laine is
80 goals ahead of this generation’s greatest goal scorer.
Laine’s production as a teenager has been historic. Jimmy Carson’s 92 goals are the most by a teenager in NHL history, followed by Dale Hawerchuk’s 85, but it doesn’t take a hockey trivia virtuoso to know Carson and Hawerchuk toiled in the league’s peak offensive years. If we adjust for era with hockey-reference.com’s formula, Carson’s goal total slips to 77, while Hawerchuk’s shrinks to 65. That puts Laine on top at 85 era-adjusted teenage goals.
It’s no stretch to call him the best teenage goal-scorer in NHL
history.
Natural progression and comfort with the NHL game already provide reason to expect Laine’s 44 goals from last season to swell. And what happens if he shoots the puck more? Ovechkin averages an incredible 4.88 shots per game in his career, scoring 12.4 percent of the time. He is a volume machine. Laine shot the puck just 2.87 times per game across his first 155 contests, with an incredible 18.0 percent success rate. Laine is a much more accurate shooter, so if he can make even incremental increases in his shot total, it will combine with his eagle-eyed accuracy to produce some truly prolific numbers. We’re talking 60-goal potential.
There’s reason to expect Laine will indeed shoot the puck more going forward. His shots per game rose from 2.79 to 2.94 last season – even though his ice time decreased from 17:55 per game to a paltry 16:29. Laine averaged 0.16 shots per minute as a rookie versus 0.18 as a sophomore. Laine did a better job firing the biscuit in Year 2, so isn’t he a strong bet to keep improving in Year 3? If his shots per minute increases modestly to, say, 0.20 and we assume coach Paul Maurice ups Laine’s ice time to, say, 18 minutes a night, you get a 53-goal season. Sounds about right.