New Jersey Devils: How Does Nico Hischier Stack Up To Recent Teenage Players?

27 games into his career Nico Hischier has shown exactly why the New Jersey Devils took him 1^st overall this summer. Coming into the draft there was plenty of debate over Nico vs Nolan and its become clear the Devils made the right choice.

However, I’m not going to write about Nico vs Nolan today. Patrick has missed a decent amount of time from injuries so instead we’ll take a look at how Nico stacks up against other #1 overall picks that played in the NHL at 18 years old.

This was inspired by some comparisons I saw on twitter.

Comparing simply off points isn’t great, but it was a good launching point. However, I wanted to focus strictly on 5v5 play.

I’m not going to talk about every single player on this chart for every stat. We’ll address the top, maybe the bottom, and where Nico stacks up.

All of these stats are retrieved from Natural Stat Trick.

TOI/GP

Starting with 5v5 TOI/GP, the leader in ice time going back to 2007-2008 for these 18 year old rookies through 27 games was Taylor Hall. On the other hand, Nico Hischier is second to last with 11:42 5v5 TOI/GP. That’s interesting to me considering he’s the Devils first line center, but he is getting plenty of special teams play still.

PP/60

Next is basically what inspired me to look into this. Points Per 60. McDavid is the clear front runner here. There’s certainly no question about that, but Hischier is second among these players at 2.73 PP/60! In a draft that was supposedly not as top heavy as previous drafts, that’s pretty significant. For comparisons sake, the next closest was Ryan Nugent-Hopkins at 2.44 PP/60. Pretty good.

S/60

We all know Nico isn’t much of a shooter. It’s clear he prefers picking up apples. I don’t think anyone is going to complain about that. Auston Matthews is the far and away leader here at 12.81 S/60 with McDavid surprisingly coming in last at 6.53 S/60. Nico is towards the middle of the pack at 7.78 S/60. This isn’t bad considering he’s not known as a shooter.

The next two are pretty telling for Nico.

iHDCF/60

High Danger Chances for Per 60 is a telling stat. We can get an idea of how well a player is performing if even if they aren’t capitalizing on all of their chances. The leader here is Auston Matthews at 7.53. He’s substantially ahead of Nico sitting at second on the list at 5.5 with McDavid right behind Nico at 5.33. That’s some pretty good company again.

Penalties Drawn/60

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Again, we see McDavid at the top at 1.72 PD/60. And again we see Hischier in second at 1.52 PD/60. I’m sure its something we’ve all noticed with Nico this year, but he continually uses his skill and speed to draw penalties.

We all knew that Nico Hischier wasn’t a generational player like McDavid coming into this draft. We even knew it wasn’t likely he was going to perform as well as Auston Matthews, but he’s pretty close. Nico probably won’t score goals as prolifically as Matthews or generate points like McDavid, but he stacks up really well against these other #1 overall picks so far. It may not win him a Calder Trophy, but you have to appreciate how much this kid is contributing at only 18.