While the first month of the 2017-18 season has gone swimmingly for the expansion darlings in Vegas, it’s been a few other clubs enjoying the most riches from their off-season gambles so far.
In St. Louis, taking a flyer on Brayden Schenn spun into a dominant top line that’s outscored even the otherworldly Tampa Bay Lightning trio at even strength. And in Philadelphia, the risky decision to move centreman Claude Giroux to the wing has resulted in 60 combined points for the captain and his linemates.
But while the season’s early goings have been highlighted by a number of breakout lines and potentially historic performances (see: Kucherov, Nikita), one question remains: where did all of the former big dogs run off to?
Let’s take a trip down memory lane to June 11, 2017 – the final day of the 2016-17 regular season. Here’s how the league’s top 10 scorers looked when that final whistle blew:
1. Connor McDavid: 100 points
2. Sidney Crosby: 89 points
3. Patrick Kane: 89 points
4. Nicklas Backstrom: 86 points
5. Nikita Kucherov: 85 pts
6. Brad Marchand: 85 pts
7. Mark Scheifele: 82 points
8. Leon Draisaitl: 77 points
9. Brent Burns: 76 points
10. Vladimir Tarasenko: 75 points
Through the opening month of 2017-18, only two from that 10-man group have gotten off to strong enough starts to currently rank among the league’s top 10 – Kucherov ranks second in the league with 29 points while Tarasenko sits tied for seventh with 20 to his name.
Fellow young guns Scheifele and McDavid aren’t too far behind, sitting right below that tier with 19 and 18 points, respectively. The rest of that usually elite group? Their slow starts have even the top 40 out of reach at the moment.
Brad Marchand: tied for 41st with 15 points
Patrick Kane: tied for 49th with 14 points
Sidney Crosby: tied for 63rd with 13 points
Nicklas Backstrom: tied for 63rd with 13 points
Leon Draisaitl: tied for 77th with 12 points
Brent Burns: tied for 208th with 7 points
That doesn’t mean we’re destined to see a McDavid-less Art Ross race in the final months of the season, of course, or that No. 87 is finishing 2017-18 outside of the top 60. Rest assured, when the season passes its midway point and the game’s best have settled into their rhythm, some familiar names are bound to rise into the upper echelon once again.
But those sluggish starts do mean it’s going to take some monstrous performances for a few scoring race mainstays to contend with Stamkos and Kucherov down the line. And history suggests closing that gap can be more difficult than expected.
October can be a bit of a sideshow at times, ripe with over-performance. But Game 1 of the season isn’t the same as Game 40 or Game 70. Eventually, the cream rises to the top. The Lightning duo’s torrid run will eventually cool, and the league’s other premier talents will hit their stride and make waves once again.
The question is, when that happens, who will have capitalized most on that run-and-gun start to the year? Looking back over the past decade, those among the elite that do manage to start hot and establish enough of a gap are often the ones who hold on by the time Game 82 rolls around.
Case in point, in the 12 campaigns that have passed since the 2004-05 lockout, the eventual Art Ross Trophy winner has ranked among the top 10 scorers by this point in the season all but three times.
The outliers: Jamie Benn’s win in 2015 saw him make an absurd late push—13 points through the final five games of the season—to climb to the top of the pile. Evgeni Malkin’s second scoring title, snagged in 2012, saw him miss time early in the year before coming back strong thanks to some especially potent chemistry with James Neal. And Alex Ovechkin’s 2008 trophy win saw him mired in the middle of the top 20 through the early goings, but by late November he had already pushed his way up the list.
In each of the other nine seasons, the eventual top scorer was off to the races after the first month, sitting somewhere in the top 10 and, more often than not, within the top five.
Where does that leave the previous Art Ross favourites? McDavid sits just a handful of points away from that top tier, but he’s getting little help from his mates at the moment, his Oilers presently ranking as the lowest-scoring team in the league.
And while Crosby has shown time and time again how much damage he can do when he gets rolling, the Penguins captain hasn’t tallied a goal in his past 10 appearances. He’s sitting at five goals and 13 points for now, a far cry from the 16 goals and 25 points he had through the same number of games last season.
So, while it’s very, very early, the Lightning duo might want to start getting their speeches ready.
Because while their high-octane chemistry may be the vessel that delivered Stamkos and Kucherov their combined 59 points so far, it could be the early-season woes for the game’s other generational talents that eventually earns one of Tampa Bay’s stars a scoring title by the season’s end.
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