VoidCreature
Before you see the light, you must die.
This is some fine research, but it's missing the central point - yeah, teams don't just go down the list of top PPG players and pick the best guy, but Hischier wasn't competing against other 1st overall picks to be selected this year, and thus there's no reason to compare them to him - he was the 1st overall pick in 2017. Given the enormous range of outcomes for 1st overall picks - while most are superstars, some have had average to above average careers and some have had far worse than that - I don't really think it's a fair comparison. Some years there just isn't really a star player taken high.
Looking at that list is just setting yourself up for disappointment because Hischier doesn't quite have the resume that a lot of these other guys did. He is simply not a player on the level of a Stamkos or Tavares, not yet.
Hischier's resume is a puzzling thing. I look back and see that he scored 61 points in 22 games as a 15 year old in the Swiss under-17 league, but I have no idea how to value that production. I know there's NHLe for the NLA, but I haven't been able to find anything on the lower leagues in Switzerland. Might be that there are so few players who come out of there you can't create a reliable metric.
You could look at Hischier's performance in international events, but those are all playing for Switzerland. Score 2 total goals in the Olympics Switzerland.
All I know for sure is that Hischier was above 1.7 PPG in his first season on a new ice surface, in a new country, before a wrist injury saw him shoot 1% over the last month and a half of the season. He was also on a terrible team that had only 3 other players who were even drafted to the NHL, and none in the first four rounds. I choose to be optimistic.
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