NHL Stat Pack: Rookie Leaders By the Numbers

With less than a month to go in the 2022-23 regular season, the race for the NHL's Calder Trophy is anything but clear-cut.

We haven't seen a runaway favorite like in recent years. Moritz Seider picked up 170 of 195 first place-votes last season, and Kirill Kaprizov went 99 of 100 in the 2020-21 campaign. 

In 2020, it was Cale Makar, Quinn Hughes and everybody else, but Makar's 116 first-place votes were still more than double Hughes' total (53).

This year, we could see a much wider voting spectrum. Seattle's Matty Beniers jumped out to an early lead in the rookie points race, with 21 points in his first 23 games this season. He also has the draft pedigree as a second-overall pick and ended up in the featured spot on the cover of THN's annual Rookie Issue.

Recently, Beniers' pace of production has slowed a bit. But with 49 points in 67 games, he maintains an eight-point lead over second-place Mason McTavish in the rookie scoring race. 

Counting stats matter to the voters from the Professional Hockey Writers' Association. But point totals are not the only thing. And they shouldn't be.

Let's take a look at which rookies are leading the way in some other key statistical categories through March 20.

Selected 23rd overall in 2021, well after Beniers and McTavish went second and third, 19-year-old Johnston has recency bias on his side. 

Johnston started out with a bang, scoring in his first career NHL game last October. But he has saved his best work for later in the season, with six goals and nine points in 10 games in March so far. 

Johnston is also one of just a handful of rookies to have appeared in every one of his team's games this season. And coach Peter DeBoer has been slowly giving him more ice time as he goes. He's up from around 14 minutes early in the season to an average of 16:55 a game so far in March.

This 22-year-old shares more than a first name with the sharp-shooting 2021 Calder winner, Kaprizov. 

In his first North American season, the Blue Jackets' fourth-round pick from 2018 put up 19 points in 16 AHL games before earning a call-up to the NHL. It's not likely that Marchenko will be heading back to the Cleveland Monsters anytime soon.

Marchenko scored his first NHL goal against the Los Angeles Kings on Dec. 11 in his fourth game and on his fourth shot. 

Now, despite having played just 46 games, his 18 goals put him just two back of Johnston for the rookie lead.

And while his ice time has also increased as the season has worn on, Marchenko's scoring pace and shooting percentage have dipped a bit from his early highs. Since the all-star break, he has five goals in 18 games while scoring at a more typical rate of 11.4 percent of his shots. 

There's often concern about how college players will handle the rigors of an 82-game NHL schedule when they first jump to the pro game. That hasn't been an issue for 2022 first-overall pick Owen Power. 

Buffalo coach Don Granato threw him straight into the fire, giving him 22:20 of average ice time through his first nine games of the year during October. 

His workload has increased a bit as the season wears on. He plays the power play, kills penalties, and has skated more overtime minutes (15:09) than any other rookie.

All told, with 1,565:48 logged so far this year, Power has played nearly 200 minutes more than the second-busiest rookie in the NHL, Ottawa Senators defenseman Jake Sanderson (1,376:29).

On the forward side, Noah Cates of the Philadelphia Flyers also deserves a shout-out. A 24-year-old drafted in the fifth round by the Flyers back in 2017, Cates leads all forwards (min. 10 games) in average ice time (17:39). Like Power, he also plays in all situations.

Cates is the top rookie ice time — behind only Power and Sanderson — at 1,217:24. The former captain at the University of Minnesota-Duluth has played a responsible two-way game all season and leads Flyers forwards with a plus-six rating. He has also dressed for every game this year, showing not just his durability but also his savvy in avoiding the healthy-scratch hook of coach John Tortorella.

Fans and data analysts love to look at stats like save percentage and goals saved above expected when assessing a goalie's season. But for the league's GMs who vote for the Vezina Trophy, wins are the number that matters.

With a record of 22-14-4 this season, Edmonton's 24-year-old stopper Stuart Skinner now leads all rookie netminders in that category. He also leads rookie goalies in minutes played (2,418:35) and total saves (1,201).

Skinner's success has been critical for the Oilers, who have all but locked down a playoff spot and could still challenge for the top spot in the Pacific Division. 

The early-season leader in the rookie goaltending category also comes from the Pacific. 

Undrafted Logan Thompson was 20-13-3 before he went down with a leg injury in mid-February. His .914 save percentage remains slightly better than Skinner's .911.

Thompson turned 26 on Feb. 25, so he cleared the NHL's age bar for rookie eligibility by just over five months. And it looks like he will have a chance to add to his totals before the end of the season. 

Thompson is with the Golden Knights for this week's three-game trip through Western Canada, which will conclude in Edmonton on Saturday with a possible head-to-head matchup between the two impressive goalie greenhorns.

If we lower the games-played minimum a bit, this season's best save percentage to date belongs to Akira Schmid of the New Jersey Devils. The 22-year-old native of Bern, Sui., has bounced back and forth between the Devils and the AHL Utica Comets this season and played well at both levels. In 16 games with New Jersey, the 6-foot-5 fifth-rounder from the 2018 draft is 8-5-2 with a .924 save percentage and 2.05 goals-against average. Schmid also played six games for the Devils last season, so this will be his final year of rookie eligibility.