He might just be the most underrated star in the NHL.



“That was a silent 82,” Jon Cooper said, marveling at Mark Scheifele’s point total from last season, seventh-best in the league.



The Tampa Bay Lightning head coach bookended his 2016-17 season with Scheifele at the World Cup of Hockey in September and the world championships in May, and came away beyond impressed by a young man he knew hardly anything about before those two events.



“I didn’t know him from Adam before the World Cup,” Cooper told The Athletic this week. “If I was going to circle a couple of the guys that I was really, really impressed with by the end of the World Cup, he was one of them.”



Cooper, an assistant on Todd McLellan’s Team North America staff at the Word Cup, recalls the extra time after practice when a handful of players would stick around for extra drills and fun on the ice.



“There was a group of...