Ladies and gentlemen, Brock Boeser has arrived, and boy is he something to behold.

Any pre-season questions about who the best player on the current Canucks roster is should now be settled, as Boeser’s taken a six-point lead in the team scoring race, and with three fewer games played to boot. The Canucks rookie had an absolutely dominant November, scoring 11 goals and adding five assists in 15 games. Those 11 goals led not just Vancouver last month, but the entire NHL.

In fact, it was the second best month by a Canucks rookie ever regarding goal scoring, trailing only Pavel Bure, known by many as the Russian Rocket, who scored 12 goals in March of his rookie year. Not sure if you’ve heard, but he was pretty good.

Pavel Bure, the lone player in Canucks history to be enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame after playing his best years in Vancouver, is also the lone player in Canucks history to pick up a Calder Trophy as the NHL’s rookie of the year, doing so in 1992. He scored 60 points that season, still a Canucks rookie record, and beat out Nicklas Lidstrom and Tony Amonte to earn the honour.

Notably, Bure accumulated those 60 points over the course of 65 games (his legendary debut was delayed until November of that year), with a 0.92 points-per-game rate. Boeser, on the other hand, has played all but three of the team’s games so far and is currently putting up points at a per-game rate of 1.09. That puts him on pace to hit 45 goals, 41 assists, and 86 points if he plays all 56 remaining games this season, which would shatter Bure’s record, and make him a shoe-in as a Calder finalist, if not the outright winner.

So, can Boeser do it? 23 games is a decent sample size, but it’s far from predictive when we’re talking events like goals and points. He’s been remarkably consistent to this point, but the worry that we hear a lot about at this point is the “rookie wall”: that part late in the season where players in their first professional year succumb to the grind of NHL action and their play and production begins to whither.

How real is the rookie wall, and how likely is Boeser to hit it as the season goes on? Those are the questions that we have to answer if we want to handicap his chances at breaking Bure’s points record and capturing the franchise’s second Calder Trophy.

There are a number of different ways that we could approach this question, and you can feel free to leave other ideas in the comments below. The route that I’m going to take is the cohort route (to the surprise of no one, I’m sure), but not the typical one that we use on this site since I’m looking for something far more specific.

I’ve taken the liberty of gathering NHL rookie data on a sample of players that meet some very specific criteria. The player has to be:

a forward;

spent the previous year in the NCAA, scoring at least a point per game;

played at least 50 NHL games in his rookie season; and

under the age of 22 as of the September 15th first, before their rookie year commences.

Gathering from 2001 and onward, this left a sample of just 13 players. It’s small and highly specific, I’ll admit, but I’m looking for a particular type of player to match up with Boeser’s situation. The sample was restricted to the NCAA because their weekends-only schedule that is often referenced when discussing the struggles to manage a full-length NHL season. Points per game and age filters were added because I’m only interested in relatively prolific offensive players, and the games played threshold is necessary to get a large sample of rookie games to track and split.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Now that we’ve narrowed the group down, here’s a look the rolling point rates for 12 of the 13 players (Krys Kolanos is the lone player in the sample not included here, both because 13 is a messy number for an array of graphs and because he’s the least inspiring of the bunch).

Figure 1 – 20-game Rolling Average Points-per-Game, Top NHL Rookie Forwards from NCAA 2001-02 to Present

Notice a pattern? You shouldn’t. The results vary wildly from player to player, from Jack Eichel and Carl Hagelin ramping up over the course of the season, to James Van Riemsdyk and Dylan Larkin falling off respective cliffs, to Dany Heatley and Johnny Gaudreau remaining consistent to the end.

If we put some numbers on this, we’ll see that the long slog of the season has a different effect on everyone – but on average, it has very little effect at all, at least on this specific sample of players. To do that, I split point-per-game production basically between the two halves of a season: October to December counts as the first half, while January to April counts as the second half. Here are the results, with the averages bolded on the left.

Table 1 – NHL Rookie Point-per-Game Half-Season Splits

Half Average Larkin Eichel Gaudreau Stepan Van Riemsdyk Oshie Toews Cogliano Kessel Stastny Eaves Kolanos Heatley First 0.584 0.676 0.605 0.789 0.605 0.556 0.385 0.914 0.475 0.333 0.737 0.462 0.475 0.846 Second 0.612 0.465 0.767 0.810 0.500 0.357 0.773 0.759 0.619 0.465 1.136 0.511 0.176 0.791

As you can see, the difference between the first half and the season, when rookies are thought to be playing on the adrenaline of making The Show, and the second half of the season, when rookies, especially ones coming out of college, are supposed to be slowing down under the weight of the grind, is pretty minimal. However, the advantage actually seems to come in the latter half of the season.

Advertisement - Continue Commenting Below

So what does this mean for Boeser? Is his current rate guaranteed to carry on throughout the season? Well, no, not really. Remember the individual point rate charts: pretty much anything can happen. He could stay the same; his stats could plunge into the abyss, or (and could you imagine this) he could get even better.

The final option seems a little too good to be true, truthfully. Boeser’s production rate through his first 32 career games is already better than every other player in the sample size I gave above. In fact, it’s up with the elite of the NHL over the past decade.

Table 2 – Most Points in First 32 NHL Games, Salary Cap Era (2005-06 to Present)

Rk Player G A PTS 1 Alex Ovechkin 19 19 38 2 Connor McDavid 13 21 34 3 Evgeni Malkin 17 17 34 4 Ryan Nugent-Hopkins 13 20 33 5 Sidney Crosby 13 19 32 6 Patrick Kane 8 23 31 7 Brock Boeser 17 13 30 8 Jonathan Toews 13 16 29 9 Artemi Panarin 9 20 29 10 John Tavares 15 12 27

That’s extraordinarily impressive company to be keeping this early in his career. Maybe he’s not a lock to maintain it, but you’ll notice that there aren’t too many players, if any, that started off this good and didn’t continue to be stars in this league.

Here’s a look at how those players fared over the course of their rookie seasons.

Figure 2 – 20-game Rolling Average Point-per-Game Rates, Elite Rookies 2005-06 to Present

Table 3 – Top NHL Rookie Point-per-Game Half-Season Splits

Half Average Ovechkin McDavid Malkin Nugent-Hopkins Crosby Kane Toews Panarin Tavares First 0.971 1.222 0.923 1.091 0.946 1.135 0.973 0.914 0.872 0.667 Second 0.988 1.378 1.125 1.089 0.680 1.364 0.800 0.759 1.049 0.650

Much like the NCAA rookies above, these elite rookies don’t follow a specific pattern but instead differ on an individual basis. And, also like the NCAA rookies, the first half/second half splits show a slight advantage to the January-April portion of the schedule.

Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee which direction Boeser’s production rate will head in as the season progresses. What I can say is this: the rookie wall is no sure thing either. It appears to be largely exaggerated, at least for high-end players like Boeser and his cohorts. Many have succumbed to it, but many others thrived as the season wore on.

My personal prediction is that Boeser sticks at or around that point per game rate for the entire season, locks up the Vancouver rookie record, and the Calder. Admittedly, that’s as much an emotional prediction as an analytical one, but it’s definitely still within the realm of possibility.

So what do you think? Leave your thoughts on my methods and your predictions for Boeser’s final goal and point totals in the comments below. Maybe they’ll be a reward for whoever gets the closest guess. There probably won’t be, but hey, you never know.

All NHL game logs and historical stats in this article were gathered from HockeyReference.com.





