Tim’s Time: Can Tim Stutzle Take the Leap this season, to Become the Sens Next Star?

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.