Whether Saku Koivu, Pierre Turgeon or Vincent Damphousse are his barometer, suffice it to say that the Montreal Canadiens have not had a number one bona fide center for a long time. In fact, it reached the point where acquiring (or not acquiring) a number one center could replace the Subban-Weber trade as the turning point in Marc Bergevin's managerial career.
The problem is that if you talk to a dozen different people, you are likely to get a dozen definitions of "center number one." Ryan O'Reilly, Paul Stastny and John Tavares are some of the most common names circulating around these parts as possible acquisition targets for the CH, but these are very different players. Could Canadians, either internally or externally, find a William Karlsson or Dylan Larkin diamond in the rough to fill the hole in half?
Would that be enough for the public, after months of speculating that Tavares might be the one who added this offseason?
The second question is unanswerable, but we can attack the first. There are many different criteria that one can use to define "center number one", but I will try to apply a statistical filter to make my definition. Next, I have arranged the best 31 points players per game in 2017-18 listed by the NHL as centers, with the following exceptions:
All numbers are percentile ranges: "99" means that the player's value for that metric was greater than the value for 98% of the players in the league. For DZ Start%, lower numbers mean that a smaller proportion of DZ begins and larger numbers mean a larger proportion. "25%" indicates values exceeded by 75% of the sampled players, "Medium" indicates values exceeded by 50%, and "75%" indicates values exceeded by 25%.
First, all these players are obviously gifted offensively. That said, it does not necessarily have to be the individuals who put discs on the network. The median of 1C is in the 78th percentile in the whole league when it comes to scoring, but it is the 84th percentile when it comes to main assists. According to that, a 1C does not necessarily have to be a prodigious shooter. Our 31 players ranged from the 14th to the 98th percentile in terms of generating individual shots, with the median being only the 69th percentile.
Second, a 1C must play big minutes with the best and against the best. Almost all the players on our list were ranked in the 90th percentile or better in terms of TOI, and almost all players occupied the 80th percentile or better when it came to the quality of the competition. It should be noted that the NHL teams are moving away from Mario Lemieux Syndrome: the idea that elite players can turn players below the average into frontline players. In contrast, 1Cs generally play with the best teammates that their clubs can offer.
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