A month or so into the 2018-19 NHL season, your points leader is Mikko Rantanen with 24, followed by his linemate Nathan MacKinnon at 21. However the leader in points per game is just behind the Colorado Avalanche duo, a familiar name in Evgeni Malkin.
No one needs me to tell them that Malkin is a dominant force in the NHL, everyone already knows that. In fact, he ranked second when measuring the impact of centres over the last three seasons. The crazy thing about Malkin is, despite the fact that we all know he’s a superstar player; I think we underrate him a fair amount.
Even leaving aside the absurd fact that he wasn’t named as one of the NHL’s top 100 players of all time, our perception of Malkin is likely undercut by the fact that he’s spent the entirety of his career behind Sidney Crosby. However even accounting for that, most years Malkin is nearly as good as Crosby, sometimes even better, and Crosby was the consensus best player in the world for about a decade before Connor McDavid stormed onto the scene.
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It shouldn’t be surprising that since Malkin entered the league in 2006-07, Crosby and McDavid are the only players to have bested his 1.19 points per game, with Crosby at 1.29 and McDavid at 1.24 respectively, and Alex Ovechkin fourth at 1.11.
Only six other players have even maintained a point-per-game pace over that same time period; Martin St. Louis, Patrick Kane, Pavel Datsyuk, Marc Savard, Ilya Kovalchuk, and Steven Stamkos.
At 32 years old, it’s natural for Malkin’s game to start deteriorating a little bit, and there has been some talk on social media about signs that this is happening, but looking at his shot production, it doesn’t seem to be very dire so far.
Using data from Corsica.Hockey, Malkin’s shot rates are indeed dropping off a bit, but the emphasis here should be on “a bit”, because while Malkin’s prime years between 2009 and 2013 are over, there hasn’t been much change at all in the last five seasons; he’s been consistently great while shooting about 78 per cent as often as he did in his mid-20s.
Malkin’s 20 points in just 11 games to start the season is clearly a hot streak – he won’t continue to score on a quarter of his shots – but looking at his shot rate can misdirect you a little as well, because so far this season Malkin has been a scoring chance machine.
Malkin actually leads the league in creating scoring chances for his teammates, and he’s been arguably the most dangerous player in the NHL at 5-on-5. I expect by the end of the year that McDavid will overtake him, because he is clearly the NHL’s best 5-on-5 player over the last couple years, but for now Malkin reigns supreme.
What I find interesting is that among this group of leaders, Malkin is also the player who is getting the most scoring chances of his own, meaning that while he’s the most dangerous playmaker in the NHL’s first month of the season, he’s also one of the top shooters.
We all know from watching him that Malkin is a bull in a china shop. He doesn’t just make plays, he forces them with his unique combination of skill and physicality. When he gets a head of steam he’s almost impossible to stop; he’s either going to score, draw a penalty, or injure himself trying to get on the board.
Playing behind Crosby certainly is a big reason why Malkin sometimes gets ignored, but I also wonder if a Canadian player played with the same level of skill and reckless abandon, how celebrated would they be? Now imagine that Canadian player had won three Stanley Cups and a Conn Smythe Trophy in their career.
Even if we all know how great Malkin is, I’m not sure if the hockey world as a whole properly appreciates how special and rare a talent he is.
