It’s early yet – just 15 or 16 games into the season with 66 to go. And we know players will tend to even out their production to their normal levels over the course of the season, but we thought we’d take a look at how some EURO peeps are doing so far.
Logan Couture has come flying out of the starting blocks faster than anyone. The four assists he picked up Friday in Athens’ 5-4 win over Prague means he now has 33 points in 16 games. Last season, when he was 33, Couture scored 77 points and only missed 2 games. This year, he is on a pace to rack up 159 points. That probably won’t happen. If it did, Couture would shatter the league record for most points in a season by a full 30 points. The Canadian center has worked magic with his wingers this season. You wouldn’t put Andre Burakovsky and Yanni Gourde on the top of your list if you were looking for great wingers, but that trio has been knocking it out of the park so far. Burakovsky, whose career best season is 33 points, already has 22 which has him tied for 3rd in the league in scoring. Gourde has 16. Evgenii Dadonov replaces Gourde when the team gets a man advantage opportunity and it’s working. Both Dadonov and Burakovsky have 5 powerplay goals so far and only one player in the league (Copenhagen’s Simon Hjalmarsson) has that many.
Couture is on a pace to improve his point total from last season by 82 points. That’s the same number of points as Guillaume Latendresse scored in 348 games as an Oslo Outlaw.
Who else is doing really well? Or doing really poorly?
We took the Season 13 point totals for the top 300 point scorers of Season 12 and found out how those players are stacking up compared to last season. Most of us know Connor McDavid isn’t having the best of days in Oslo right now. His 9 points in 15 games is going to make it all but impossible to match the 108 he scored last season. The same with Anze Kopitar, who led everyone in scoring with 116 points in Helsinki, only to struggle this season in Bratislava, where he also has 9 points. On top of that, he just hurt his back Friday against the Berlin Thugs.. er, Smurfs and will miss close to two months of games. Bobby Ryan scored 73 points for Minsk last season and through 15 games as a Belfast Giant, he has yet to score a point. Guess which season he liked better.
At the other end of the scale, with Couture, are two players who are on pace to better their Season 12 point totals by more than 50 points. Jean-Gabriel Pageau, 29, of Copenhagen has been a solid right wing on the Tridents’ second line for more than four seasons now and in that time, he has won two EURO Cups. But this season, for some reason, he is lighting up the scoreboard like he hasn’t thus far in his career. His 19 points in 15 games have him on a pace to score 104 points. Sam Bennett, 26, of Helsinki has seen his ice time go up from 9 to 16 minutes per game this season, so an improvement is expected, but the guy who scored 27 points in 75 games last season is scoring at a point-per-game rate.
Here is a look at the players who are on pace for the biggest improvements and biggest declines:
