After a rocky start, the 21st overall pick of the 2017 draft finally potted his first goal of the season, has moved up to first line, and is looking like the skilled power-forward the New York Rangers thought he was. Since ending his 17 game goal drought he’s netted four goals in four games. But with only 28 NHL games under his belt, what can we expect for the rest of the year?

Getting picked in the first-round as a 17-year old can come with a lot of pressure. Getting drafted as a 17-year old by a New York City team that hasn’t had a first round pick in four years is a whole other beast.

Despite the added pressure and acclimation to the smaller North American ice, the Czech native seems to be handling himself pretty well.

In 21 games this season he’s recorded four goals and three assists, but that is in large part due to his ice time and playing partners. In his first 17 games he averaged 12:12 of ice time, good for 19th on the team close to fourth liners Vinni Lettieri and Cody McLeod.

After playing over 201 minutes the 6’2’’ center finally netted his first goal of the season and was rewarded with nearly 15 minutes of ice time against the surprisingly good Vancouver Canucks. He’s now scored four goals in four straight games with an increased TOI of 14:42. As his playing time is increasing so is his confidence and that is leading to greater expectations. So what can we realistically expect for the next 61 games of the year?

Czech yourself

The number of players that hail from the Czech Republic are dwarfed by players from Canada, USA, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Percentage wise, they only make up 4%. Because of the small sample size of NHL players that come from the Czech-Extraliiga, a better comparable would be former first-rounders from Chytil’s development league. To find the most recent first-round pick from Czech prior to 2017, you’d have to go back to 2012 to Martin Biron’s nemesis, Tomas Hertl.

In his career, Hertl has 86 goals and 100 assists in 344 games. But let’s look at his first NHL season…

In 2013 Hertl played 35 games before going down with a knee injury, missing all but the last two games of the season. He started hot, recording 25 points and was a +11. In 2014-15 he played a full 82 games, but suffered the sophomore jinx, registering 13 goals and 18 assists.

In his first 21 games, Hertl recorded four goals and five assists, same amount of goals as Chytil and two extra apples thus far (while averaging 14:33 of ice time).

So comparing Chytil to Hertl’s first full season as well as calculating his current point total to an 82 game season, we could reasonably expect him to tally 10-15 more goals and 10-12 more assists. For a rebuilding team that’s constantly shuffling the 19-year old’s line placement, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to see the former first-rounder finish with a final line of 16g-14a-30p.