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When Hutson and Suzuki invite themselves into the same category as McDavid and Draisaitl
Michaël Petit
When Hutson and Suzuki invite themselves into the same category as McDavid and Draisaitl
Credit: Getty Images

I’m not telling you anything new by saying that Nick Suzuki and Lane Hutson are each having an incredible season.

In terms of basic statistics (points, differential, etc.), it’s easy to determine how useful a player is to their team on the surface.

But a player’s overall usefulness is much more complex than the points they accumulate over the course of a season.

Advanced statistics can be great for this, but knowing everything is not necessarily simple.

In basketball, for example, there’s the PER, which is a statistic that demonstrates a player’s usefulness to their team using several advanced statistics.

It’s a simple number that encompasses everything you could use to determine a player’s overall productivity.

A PER below 10 is not very good, a PER between 10 and 15 is good, while a PER of 20 or more demonstrates that a player is among the elite. And then there are the Nikola Jokićs of the world whose PER is always above 30, which is rarely seen in the NBA.

A few years ago, Dom Luszczyszyn from The Athletic created the “Game Score” and the “Average Game Score” so that there would be similar data to PER in hockey. And it works pretty much the same way.

To learn more about the Game Score, you can click on this link.

Recently, the Twitter page HockeyStatCards posted a tweet showing the top five Average Game Scores for the month of March only.

Not surprisingly, Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid are at the top with an average of 2.25 and 2.17 respectively, but the next two players are at least surprising.

Nick Suzuki (1.97) and Lane Hutson (1.77) are third and fourth in this data.

In short, what this means is that Suzuki and Hutson are the third and fourth most effective players for their team for the month of March in the entire NHL.

It’s amazing when you think about it.

It shows that Suzuki and Hutson are not just filling the scoresheet, but they are extremely useful to the Habs for all sorts of reasons.

By the way, if you go to the HockeyStatCards site, you can see the best single-game performances for each team based on the Game Score.

Based on this data, we can see that it’s Mike Matheson who had the biggest impact for the Habs in a specific game, the one on November 11th.

The second-best overall performance is Lane Hutson’s from March 30th, his three-assist game against the Florida Panthers.

(Credit: HockeyStatCards)

Another interesting fact, we see Kaiden Guhle’s name appear several times in this category.

Another proof that it’s not just about points to be useful to your team.

In short, the data that is the Game Score is very interesting, especially for fans of advanced statistics. It encompasses several stats to group them under a single piece of data.


In Overtime

– According to Raymond Bourque, the Habs would not be in the playoffs if it weren’t for Lane Hutson’s incredible season.

– If Hutson receives votes for the Norris in addition to winning the Calder, aside from Cale Makar’s rookie season in 2020, you would have to go back to Bobby Orr’s rookie season to see a player accomplish that.

– A very emotional short film, for those interested.

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