OK, now that we have the complete season in the books. Calling back to a discussion we had earlier in the year, when Lafrenière was not putting any points on the board really. I was making the point that a lot of 1OA are relatively unproductive at even strength in the first part of their rookie seasons and improve as the season goes along. At the time of the conversation, Lafrenière was well behind many of them in terms of production and there was a lot of concern about what it meant for his future.
-His final number number for ES p/60 this year was
1.80.
-I know some people don't like this kind of thing, but others do: if you eliminated the first 27 days from the season, the number is
2.12. I chose 27 days to represent the time he would've gotten in training camp because that's how many days it was from the opening of Traverse City through opening night of the 2019-20 season. In other words, what kind of lead-in Kakko got.
Below is the ES p/60 in their first 56 games in their rookie seasons for all 1OA forwards drafted that we have TOI numbers for. The average is 1.93 and the median is 2.02. So, he ends up with slightly below average production looking at the whole year, or slightly above average production if you remove the "training camp" of the early season. So, for anyone out there still under the impression that he had an historically bad rookie year for a 1OA... he did not. Like everyone else here, I'm sure, I wish that he had gotten PP time. I wish that he had gotten elevated more quickly after showing what he did on the kid line for that stretch, proving he was ready for it. Either way, here we are. I don't really think we have any cause for concern moving forward.
| Player | ES p/60 56gp | |
| McDavid | 3.00 | 45gp |
| Ovechkin | 2.77 | |
| Crosby | 2.48 | |
| Kovalchuk | 2.38 | |
| Matthews | 2.32 | |
| Hischier | 2.30 | |
| MacKinnon | 2.21 | |
| Yakupov | 2.18 | 48gp |
| Stefan | 2.02 | |
| Nugent-Hopkins | 2.00 | |
| Hall | 1.85 | |
| Lafrenière | 1.80 | |
| Nash | 1.66 | |
| Stamkos | 1.48 | |
| Tavares | 1.25 | |
| Hughes | 1.03 | |
| Lecavalier | 1.01 | |
| Thornton | 0.90 | 55gp |
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