Ryan Jones will ruefully admit that he didn’t know what to make of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins before the Edmonton Oilers stepped onto the ice for their first workouts in training camp last fall. Jones knew Nugent-Hopkins had been the first overall pick from the Red Deer Rebels a few months before, but the Oilers veteran forward had not seen him play in junior. Jones could only go by the 18-year-old’s appearance: maybe five-foot-eleven, maybe 170 lb., not a scar or whisker on him, an expression that seemed to stretch from relaxed to nonchalant. Based on first impressions, Jones could understand why some hockey men and fans worried that a good prospect was being rushed to the NHL before he was ready. “If someone had told me that he was going to be a point-a-game player in the NHL when the season started, I would have told him he was insane,” Jones says. “It’s a big adjustment for any kid to jump to the NHL. He didn’t look like he was ready at all.”
By the second day of training camp, though, Jones’s thinking had turned a full 180 degrees. In hockey terms, Nugent-Hopkins was 18 going on 30. “He had such amazing hockey sense and vision, you knew he could step in right away and have an impact,” Jones says.a
That’s not to judge those who had doubts too harshly. Fact is, Jones was more confident about Nugent-Hopkins’s imminent success than the kid was himself. “I thought I was having a pretty good camp,” says Nugent-Hopkins. “It was my first pro camp, the first time I was on the ice with players that skilled and that fast and that big. I was still finding my way around the ice. I had to learn and make adjustments on the fly.”
In short order it was the Oilers’ opponents who had to make adjustments to Nugent-Hopkins; they failed with regularity. Through the first couple of months of the season, he not only topped all rookies in scoring but also climbed into the ranks of the league leaders. His numbers told only part of the story. He might have caught a few opponents by surprise early but most of the time he was facing teams’ top defensive pairings. He wasn’t simply a beneficiary of a winger’s breakout season—then-coach Tom Renney shuffled his lines in the first half and the rookie played beside almost all the wingers on the roster at one point or another. By December, still only 18, Nugent-Hopkins had established himself as the clear favorite for the Calder Trophy.
The concern about any prospect jumping to the NHL is a susceptibility to injury. It’s a matter of physics: Bigger bodies times greater speed equals impact that will break or shred young bodies. A lot of elite prospects who stepped in at 18 weren’t able to avoid injury, including horses like Rick Nash and Ilya Kovalchuk. So when Nugent-Hopkins went down with a separated shoulder in December, many of the discredited doubters tried to say “I told you so.” That, however, was a reach that flew in the face of the facts. “It was a fluke play,” says Nugent-Hopkins. “Nobody hit me. I just fell funny. It could have happened in the NHL. It could have happened in junior or in practice.”
Nugent-Hopkins missed a few weeks and his output fell off when he returned to the lineup, costing him the Calder—all due respect to the eventual winner, Colorado’s Gabriel Landeskog. Those inside the game see Nugent-Hopkins as having a far better chance of being a defining player down the line. In comparing the two, one NHL scout described it as the difference between a prospect and a prodigy: “Landeskog will be a first-line NHL player for a generation and a team leader, but Nugent-Hopkins does things and sees things on the ice that veteran all-stars can’t.”
No team in the NHL has more elite young prospects than the Oilers, the compensation for finishing near or at the bottom of the Western Conference consistently the past few seasons. And when the league reopens for business on some as-yet-to-be-determined date, it’s likely that the team will ice the last three first-overall draft picks. Taylor Hall was the top pick in 2010 and Nail Yakupov last June. Factor in Jordan Eberle, he of the dramatic last-second goal against the Russians at the world juniors a few years ago, and there’s no shortage of candidates to be the face of the Oilers going forward. But Nugent-Hopkins is the clear front-runner.
At some level it goes to position. Goaltenders can be franchise players (Martin Brodeur) and likewise defencemen (Zdeno Chára). Wingers can be the face of the franchise (Alex Ovechkin). Ultimately, though, centre is the position befitting a franchise player; the game building from the middle out, the puck on his stick at the faceoff. These days it’s Sidney Crosby and Steven Stamkos. Historically it was Gretzky and Lemieux. When there are two candidates, it falls to the centre to be the lead man (see Steve Yzerman and Nicklas Lidström).
But it’s more than position that stamps Nugent-Hopkins as the most likely franchise player in Edmonton. Even though Yakupov is a few months younger, even though Hall and Eberle are not so very much older, there’s a sense that they came out of junior much closer to finished products than Nugent-Hopkins. Hall, for example, will likely fill out, become stronger, maybe a half step faster, but he’ll still be a winger in the conventional mould. Hall’s, Eberle’s and Yakupov’s games are straightforward, not subtle. Not only is Nugent-Hopkins playing a more demanding position, but it seems like he has more upside, like RN-H 2.0 and 3.0 could be radically different versions.
The instructive example is the player Nugent-Hopkins cites as the biggest influence on him, also a native of Burnaby, B.C.: Joe Sakic. Nugent-Hopkins’s and Sakic’s stories overlap in more than geography. At 18, Sakic was even less ready physically for the NHL than Nugent-Hopkins last year, and was sent back to junior to fill out. (In fairness to Sakic, he came along during a dark age when the rules of the game were unkind to modest-sized players.)
Sakic gained size and strength over time. Though he was never a power forward, per se, by the end of his career he was as strong pound-for-pound as any player in the league. Nugent-Hopkins is on the same course. “I’ve managed to put on 10 pounds since the end of the season,” he says. “I don’t know if I’m still growing—I might get up over six feet, but I definitely can fill out.”
By simple statistics, it’s easy to place Burnaby’s latest ahead of Burnaby’s all-time greatest at the same stage in their careers. Nugent-Hopkins’s numbers at 18 compare favourably with Sakic’s rookie year when he was a year older and playing in a higher scoring league. “If it turns out that I have a career like [Sakic’s] and Stanley Cups, I’ll take that any day,” Nugent-Hopkins says.
It’s a lofty goal, but Ryan Jones can tell you that you underestimate Ryan Nugent-Hopkins at your peril.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet Magazine.