Nikita Kucherov is one of the NHL's most elusive interview subjects. The two-time league MVP isn't the type to welcome reporters to his dressing room stall for chats, and on the rare occasion he speaks into a microphone, the exchange tends to be uneventful.
Kucherov's season-opening media availability last week followed the same theme for the first three minutes. In the fourth and final minute, however, the Lightning superstar offered a strong and spicy take on the changes he's noticed in NHL hockey over his 12-year career.
"The game now is a lot faster, but dumb," Kucherov told reporters in Tampa Bay. "I think that's all I can say. Yes, it is faster, but it's very dumb. Low IQ."
Dumb in what way?
"In a hockey way," the 33-year-old winger replied.
Reporters laughed.
"That's all I can say," Kucherov continued. "There's obviously a lot of guys that have very high IQ, and it's fun to watch them play. But, boy, there's a lot of guys that (are) dumb."
And that was it: Kucherov didn't elaborate, and the media session ended. A 38-second clip of the exchange quickly went viral, and the discussion and debate weren't confined to social media.
"I hope Kucherov never expands on his thoughts there," former NHL head coach Dallas Eakins said in a phone interview from Germany, where he manages and coaches DEL powerhouse Adler Mannheim. "He has all of hockey talking. 'Hey, where can we all be better?' That's so important to the game. It's so important to stop and think. There's going to be 50 different opinions about what he said, and they're probably all going to be right."
Do Kucherov's 'dumb' and 'low IQ' remarks have merit?
Kucherov first broke out in 2014-15 as a member of the Lightning's so-called Triplets line. He manned the right wing, Ondrej Palat assumed the left, and Tyler Johnson lined up down the middle. The nickname was a nod to the trio's shared intelligence on the ice.
Johnson, who retired in 2025 after 747 NHL games for three teams, agrees with Kucherov's assessment. The sport, he said, is currently emphasizing speed and skill to an extreme degree, leaving hockey IQ and sense — the ability to think the game — on the back burner.
Take the Power Edge Pro training methods popularized by Connor McDavid and other Generation Z stars. In a vacuum, Johnson said, there's nothing wrong with a player dedicating ice time to drills aimed at improving dynamic stickhandling, explosive skating, and maneuverability in tight spaces. But Johnson added, it can promote individuality.
"I do think focusing on it too much makes you a bit of an independent player," he said.
"A lot of these kids that are coming into the league are so used to beating everybody with their skill. In a way, that's a lower-hockey-IQ way of playing because you're not using your teammates. You're not making players around you better. If you watch Kuch, that's one thing he does exceptionally well. He makes everyone around him better because he's always in the right spots. He always makes those right plays. He doesn't try to beat you one-on-one."
Thomas Hickey, the ex-NHL defenceman turned Amazon Prime and MSG broadcaster, doesn't know Kucherov personally like Johnson, but considers the three-time scoring champ a brilliant and efficient player who's mastered the game's subtleties and finer details.
"In a lot of ways, Kucherov's right about hockey IQ," Hickey said in reference to the industry-wide obsession with speed and skill. "But it's like the analogy of chess versus checkers. Kucherov's playing chess and everybody else is playing checkers."
Kucherov's words on the subject carry immense weight and authority because he's in the conversation for the smartest player on the planet. His viewpoint is also warped. By default, most NHLers are going to be "low IQ" compared to Kucherov, McDavid, and other high-IQ skaters like Quinn Hughes, Mark Stone, Sam Reinhart, and Jaccob Slavin, to name a few.
"You need a hockey brain to be able to play in this league. For sure," Sabres defenceman Rasmus Dahlin said Tuesday in Buffalo. "But there's different levels. It's so hard to comment on, honestly. There's incredibly smart players, like (Kucherov), and there's some not-as-smart players too in this league. They get by. They have different roles."
Longtime NHL bench boss Lindy Ruff chuckled when asked for his two cents on Kucherov's comments and the state of hockey IQ and sense in general.
"Well, I don't know if they started IQ testing yet," Ruff quipped.
"The league is so tight," the Sabres coach added. "The speed throughout the lineups is really good. I don't know if that's a fair comment (from Kucherov), to tell you the truth. I think that every team is trying to take the other team's best players away ... Some guys on the fourth line are sometimes the fastest guys on the ice. I think that's frustrating to play against. I think that's where our game is at today; that's all. I don't know about the hockey IQ part."
"The role a lot of times of your third and fourth lines is speed and energy. I don't think that's dumb in any sense. 'Let your top players win you the game' (is) a lot of the time (how) teams think. Those guys that are playing in that (down-the-lineup) role can be really frustrating to play against. I think that can frustrate a lot of top players."
What might be contributing to lower IQ? Is anybody/anything to blame?
Private coach Kane Lafranchise doesn't believe Kucherov was calling his peers stupid last week. He views the soundbite as a commentary on modern player development.
"We've become really good at developing execution. But execution and understanding the game aren't always the same," said Lafranchise, an Edmonton-based development coach whose client list features Dylan Guether, Kaiden Guhle, Matthew Savoie, and other pros.
An example of solely executing, Lafranchise said, would be acing a fast-paced, skill-based drill that looks stunning in an Instagram clip but, in reality, fails to replicate a game-like situation. To help players better understand the game, Lafranchise and his colleagues at Shyft Hockey add problem-solving elements to on-ice drills. A defenceman doesn't simply retrieve a puck in the defensive zone; he does so while battling multiple layers of pressure and selecting the best pass option. The key is to mix the flashy skills with substance.
"Hockey IQ is about processing pressure, your space, your timing, how you support your teammates, etc. It's also about trying to find the right solution before the window to make the right play closes," said Lafranchise, a former AHL blue-liner himself. "The hard part is that, with the game being as fast as it is, that processing speed has to be incredibly quick."
Despite being a six-foot-six, 226-pound defenceman, Buffalo's Owen Power is best known for smooth skating and smarts. The 2021 first-overall pick, like most people in the sport today, believes a player's hockey IQ can be improved through experience, video work, and proper coaching. In Power's case, years spent playing competitive lacrosse, basketball, and volleyball helped him develop spacing, body positioning, and pattern recognition on the ice.
"You see nowadays that a lot of guys are just playing one sport (as kids). They go out and do skills with nobody else on the ice. For me, you pick up a lot of stuff from other sports, and you pick up a lot of stuff playing games versus just stickhandling through cones," Power, 23, said. "(Hockey IQ is) definitely something you can teach and work on. Is it maybe a little harder than some skills to teach? Yeah … But there are already some guys (in the private coaching space) who are pretty good at teaching it and have helped guys a ton."
Multiple people interviewed for this story wondered if, in a copycat league like the NHL, the latest in coaching trends are contributing to the perception that players are dumber.
"Teams that turn the puck over are the teams that lose, so coaches are really harping on their players to not turn the puck over," Johnson said. "Well, the only way to really ensure you don't turn the puck over is to limit your risk. Sometimes that's not the smartest approach because now you're limiting what (your star) players can do. There's a fine line there."
Others see it differently, pointing to the smarts required to execute within the rigorous, forecheck-heavy systems of recent Stanley Cup-winning clubs like Florida and Carolina.
"Playing hockey is simple, but playing simple hockey is difficult," is how one former NHL coach, who asked not to be quoted for the story, put it. Simple hockey, he said, wins.
Is this bad news for the future of hockey or no big deal?
An amateur scout for an NHL team found Kucherov's comments to be flippant.
"To me, it sounds like sour grapes from a guy who scored only two goals in the last four years in the playoffs and lost in the first round each time," the scout said, before rattling off nine "creative, perceptive, and smart" NHLers under the age of 25: "Macklin Celebrini. Connor Bedard. Will Smith. Gabe Perreault. Ryan Leonard. Matthew Knies. Beckett Sennecke. Zach Benson. Matthew Schaefer. I could go on and on here."
Don't count the scout among those worried about talent dilution through expansion.
What those who agree and disagree with Kucherov are in lockstep on is that all of the best NHL players are also the smartest. Hockey IQ is arguably the biggest separating skill.
"The thing that separates players now, to me, isn't how fast they are or how strong they are or how much skill they have. If they're five-foot-10, or, heck, that kid drafted last year that's seven-foot-one, it's not that, no," said Eakins, who spent his five-plus seasons as an NHL head coach between Edmonton and Anaheim. "It's all about how they think. I call it their processor. How is their processor working? How does the processor work?"
Eakins and Lafranchise both mentioned the importance of finding the "quiet ice" in today's game. Forwards and defencemen who consistently find it — see: Kucherov — rocket up the scoring leaderboards. Another separator: self-confidence, which Kucherov doesn't lack either.
"I absolutely love his mindset," Dahlin said of Kucherov. "He puts himself (out there) as a smart guy (with the way he trains), and then he believes he's way, way smarter than everybody else. That makes him a better player. I love his mentality. More guys should think like him."
