Consider Hughes’s routine with the US NTDP in Plymouth, Mich. There are the expected constants: high school during the morning and early afternoon; practice and gym work later on. But in the midst of that — certainly when he’s at the USA Hockey complex and very likely when he gets home, and perhaps even during spare minutes at school or in transit — Hughes will screen hockey video footage. It might be on a laptop or an iPad. It might be on a monitor in the coach’s office or even on his iPhone. And it won’t be a show of packaged news highlights. It will be either: sequences from NTDP games or sequences from NHL games, often but not always Sidney Crosby’s. He views them with eyes trained to pick out the details, as you’d expect from the son of a coach. Says Hughes, “I watch a lot of Patrick Kane because we’re physically pretty similar and have sort of the same skills, but I’ve picked up a lot from Crosby. The way that he uses his edges, his body position, the way he keeps his body between the checker and the puck, and the way he uses and finds his teammates … technically, it’s all that you want to do. I find things that I want to try [in the NHL video] and look for things that I can do better [with the NTDP video].”

Within a couple of hours after a game, a member of the NTDP staff will edit together videos for the players — general team footage, but also packages specific to individuals, readied for the coaches for review. The coaches will probably wait until the next day to screen it, but Hughes and a lot of his teammates won’t. As soon as that video is up for sharing and streaming, Hughes will be all over it. “Sometimes I call Jack in to the office to watch some video — whether it’s his game or NHL stuff — and other times he’ll ask if he can come in,” NTDP coach John Wroblewski says. “I do it with everybody, of course, but Jack is a sponge for coaching. He really wants it … anything where he can pick up an advantage. Every player who thinks there isn’t room for improvement is going to flatline … He’s a real student of the game. He watches video here and I know that when he gets home, he’s breaking it down even more.”

This routine — nay, ritual — does not stamp Jack Hughes as remarkable in his class, however remarkable his skills might be. In fact, this illustrates that even the very best player in his class is like so many other players who are emerging in the NHL’s second century — the average pro prospect is enriching himself with this sort of video tutorial. For Hughes, for any other elite player, for those who only aspire to be elite, a game is first played and then watched and rewatched. When Hughes walked into Wroblewski’s office, almost anything the coach screened was a second viewing for the teenager. The same applies for his teammates. Perhaps there are a few that remain incurious and casual about the game who excel, who reach the game at the highest level. No matter how committed they might be when the puck is dropped, their potential can’t be fully tapped until they’ve effectively exhausted all means of preparation.