The NHL’s hierarchy of elite players has a very easily defined group at the top.
You have Sidney Crosby, the best player of his generation and already an all-time great with his consistently growing list of individual and team achievements. Scoring titles. Goal scoring crowns. Multiple MVPs. Gold medals. Three Stanley Cups. A truly dominant force all over the ice.
You have Connor McDavid, already a scoring champion and league MVP when he was still only 20 years old. He is already pushing Crosby for the title of best current player in the world, and you might even already have him in the top spot. At the very least, he and Crosby are the NHL’s 1A and 1B when it comes to the best.
POWER RANKINGS: Lightning bolt to No. 1, Kings crack top five
Then you have Erik Karlsson, a generational talent on the blue line who might be the league’s most impactful defenseman since Bobby Orr. His ability to drive the Senators’ offense, play half of the game and dominate the way he does makes him an unmatched weapon. He has already won two Norris Trophies and probably should have won two more (he has finished as the runner-up in each of the past two seasons).
These three are clearly at the top of the list.
But who comes next? And is there another player who belongs in that upper tier with the trio of Crosby, McDavid and Karlsson?
Perhaps a player like Vladimir Tarasenko or Patrick Kane gets mentioned. Maybe you like a goalie, and when he is healthy and on top of his game Carey Price can absolutely be in that discussion because few players can impact a game or a team the way he can when he is right. Or maybe you like another of the NHL’s future megastars in Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews.
MORE: Stories behind creepiest goalie masks in NHL history
All solid choices. But none of them are probably the right answer.
Instead, let’s turn our focus to Lightning forward Nikita Kucherov, as he is currently putting together an astonishingly dominant run that has seen him rip apart the NHL on a nightly basis.
He continued it Tuesday night in Tampa Bay’s 5-1 win over the Hurricanes when he scored what was his league-leading 11th goal of the season (in just 10 games) and maintained his scoring pace that had him second in the league in total points behind only teammate Steven Stamkos. It is an incredible start that has literally seen him average more than a goal per game for a significant portion of the season. That sort of sustained production is almost unheard of in today’s NHL, where goal-scoring remains near an all-time low.
But for Kucherov, it is not just about the first 10 games of this season. This also goes back to the last 2 1/2 months of the 2016-17 season.
FILM SESSION: On Connor McDavid and the elements of speed
Kucherov, a second-round draft pick by the Lightning in 2011, has shown steady improvement in his production every year that he has been in the NHL. He was a key part of a Lightning team that went to the Stanley Cup Final in 2015, then followed with a Game 7 loss on the road (a one-goal game to the eventual Stanley Cup champions) from returning. But last season, his performance and production went to an entirely new level when he had what was, at the time, a breakout year that saw him finish tied for second in the league in goals scored (40) and fifth in total points (85).
It was during the latter two months of the season that the Lightning started to become his team.
On Feb. 1, the Lightning found themselves with the fifth-worst record in the NHL and pretty much left for dead in the playoff race.
Stamkos was done for the season. They had experienced several other key injuries, and were on the verge of going into a sellers mode where they started to trade veteran players. It was at that point Kucherov took over and single handedly put the team on his back, bringing them back from the dead, and giving them a shot to make the playoffs going into the season’s final weekend. They ended up falling a single point short, but the fact they were even in contention, considering where they were two months earlier and everything they had been through from an injury and trade perspective, was amazing.
During that run, Kucherov led the league in goals (21) and total points (40) while the Lightning went 19-7-4 to finish the season. Kucherov himself had a hand in 44 percent of the team’s goals. Everything was going through him.
That run has continued into this season.
BERKSHIRE: Kings' goal-scoring renaissance cuts both ways
Dating back to Feb. 1, Kucherov’s 32 total goals in 40 games are seven more than any other player in the NHL. His 58 points are six more than any other player. He is on a 120-point pace over 82 games.
If you look at his production from just Feb. 20, the gap between him and the rest of the NHL becomes even larger.
Since that date he has 11 more points (53) and seven more goals (30) than any other player in the league.
As of Wednesday, he has at least one point in 28 of his past 33 games (including 13 in a row), a stretch that includes 17 games with multiple points. In six of those games, he has recorded at least three points, including two four-point games. He has done all of that while also being a possession-driving forward who is close to a 55 percent Corsi player.
SPORER: Time to break up Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl?
So far this season, he is carrying around a pretty ridiculous shooting percentage (29 percent) that is almost certainly going to fall at some point. But one of the things that we sometimes overlook during these “unsustainable” hot stretches that a player has is that they still happened. You can’t take away the goals or the production, and while it’s not likely to continue at the same pace, it is still something that only a few players are capable of over such a lengthy period of time.
Even if Kucherov sees a regression in his shooting percentage down to a more normal level (which for him is still 15 percent, a fairly high number and strong reflection of his shooting ability) for the rest of the season, his shot volume is still such (3.7 shots on goal per game) that he would still score another 40 goals over the remaining 72 games of the season. On top of the 11 he already has, that would make for a 51-goal season.
Keep in mind that over the past 10 full seasons only seven different players have scored 50 goals in a season (Alex Ovechkin, Jarome Iginla, Ilya Kovalchuk, Evgeni Malkin, Corey Perry, Stamkos and Crosby). Two of them are no longer active in the NHL.
GRETZ: Red Wings, finally caught by salary cap, face long road back
The Lightning have been pretty fortunate with Kucherov and his path to NHL stardom at this point, from the fact they were able to get him in the second round of the draft after he was passed over 57 times, to the fact they have him signed for this season and next at a salary cap hit of just $4.76 million. It makes him one of the biggest steals in the league for a player who is not on an entry-level contract.
After this season, he will be eligible for a new long-term contract again and you can be sure it will not be another short-term bridge deal. It would be a massive, long-term contract that will likely make him one of the highest paid players in the NHL. Deservedly so.
With an 8-1-1 start through their first 10 games, the Lightning are rolling, and with a fully healthy roster from the start — including the return of Stamkos, which is like basically picking up a new All-Star level player — they are looking like one of the best teams in the league once again and out to show the 2016-17 season was the outlier. They have one of the NHL’s top-five defensemen in Victor Hedman, one of the generation’s best goal-scorers in Stamkos, and in Kucherov a player who now has to be considered one of the top-five players in the world.
His production currently has him right on par with the Crosbys and McDavids (and for a pretty lengthy stretch here recently pretty far ahead of them), and his ability to impact his team’s success is nearly unmatched in the league right now. As he has gone, so go the Lightning.
And right now the Lightning are playing like a Stanley Cup contender in large part because Kucherov is playing at a nearly unreachable level.