Nick Suzuki
Let’s start with another young center right in the division. Nick Suzuki burst onto the scene in the 2021 Stanley Cup playoffs, and has been seen as a high upside future number one center since. There’s also a really good reason for that. In his first two seasons he put up forty-one points each year, while scoring a total of sixteen points en-route to the team’s Stanley Cup Final appearance. This past season, in his third year in the league, Suzuki scored twenty-one goals and doled out forty assists for sixty-one points total. The talented twenty-two year old also had a career high in faceoff percentage wins, winning just about half he took in 2021-22.
This feels like an obvious start point to compare Tim Stutzle to; as both are young centers on teams with constant moving pieces around them. Point production is also similar, as for their respective careers Suzuki is a .68 point per game player and Stutzle is at .66 points per game. The only glaring weakness the young Sens forward has would be his low faceoff win percentage. At 38%, he has a lot to improve upon to become a true number one center. However, some encouraging news on this front would be that Stutzle improved from his rookie season, where he only won 30% of his faceoffs. With that in mind, let’s move to a young all-star.