Marco Rossi has been a reasonable success in the NHL so far.

He’ll turn 25 in September. And when he does, he’ll have already played 235 NHL regular season games across parts of five seasons and two teams (Minnesota Wild and Vancouver Canucks), with 136 points to show for his efforts. He’ll already have career highs of 24 goals and 60 points, set in the 2024-25 season, which is a far greater amount than the average NHL player will ever achieve.

But at the same time, Rossi – the ninth overall selection in the 2020 Entry Draft – has yet to fully deliver on his pre-draft potential.

Heading into the 2020 Draft, Rossi was ranked safely within the top-10 rankings, with many scouts having him in the top-five. Rossi really exploded in his draft year, going from 65 points for the Ottawa 67s the season before to 120 in just 56 games. At the time, only Dylan Strome and Mitch Marner had scored more points as first-year draft-eligible players in the OHL, and they went third and fourth overall in 2015. This earned Rossi the scoring title and the OHL MVP award, along with some lofty comparisons.

Rossi’s offensive abilities, combined with his dedication to two-way play and tenacious competitiveness, had him compared to some of the greatest Selke contenders in modern NHL history – namely, Pavel Datsyuk and Patrice Bergeron, according to both The Hockey Writers and Smaht Scouting.

The only thing consistently mentioned as working against Rossi was his size. He was listed as a perhaps-slightly-generous 5’9” heading into the draft, and he hasn’t gained much height since. It is believed that size was the primary reason Rossi dropped from his lofty projections to ninth overall.

In any case, the consensus from scouts was fairly clear and consistent: if Rossi could overcome his size and build a long-term career in the NHL, he had a real chance to become a number one centre.

At this point, we can probably safely tuck away those Bergeron and Datsyuk comparisons. Even the most optimistic individuals probably don’t have Rossi on a Hall of Fame track. But what about just hitting that 1C status? Is it also too late to hold out hope for that? Maybe not.

First, let’s try to define what a 1C really is. If we just go by the notion that there are 32 teams and thus 32 number one centres in the league, the results are kind of surprising. If we look at the past three NHL seasons combined (2023-24 to 2025-26), we find that the 32^nd-highest scoring centre over that span is…Elias Pettersson. No, seriously, his 185 points rank him right in between Vincent Trochek and Bo Horvat at the basest threshold of 1C production.

By this standard, Rossi isn’t terribly far off. The bottom end of top centres seems to produce about 60-70 points a season, on average, and Rossi already has a 60-point effort under his belt.

But most would agree that Pettersson has not been a true 1C over the past three seasons, and thus the threshold probably needs to be set a little higher.
Over that same three-year span, only 23 different centres achieved a points-per-game average of 0.90 or higher. And not only does that seem like a truer threshold for 1C status, when we look at that list of players, from Connor McDavid on down to Wyatt Johnston, we don’t see anyone who stands out as ‘obviously not a 1C.’

And that sort of production would require a leap forward from Rossi, whose highest PPG in any season so far is the 0.73 he achieved in 2024-25.

We realize we’ve spoken mainly about production until now, and that there is more that goes into a 1C than just scoring. That said, Rossi came into the league with a well-rounded two-way game and has only continued to grow it at the pro level. Suffice it to say, then, that if Rossi could get his scoring up to that 0.9 PPG range, most would have to agree that he’s at least a borderline 1C.

So, is there still time for Rossi to get there?

One thing that has worked against Rossi’s favour, but might work in favour of a later breakout, is that he lost a lot of developmental time after being drafted. Not only was Rossi’s draft year shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic, he then contracted a particularly bad case of COVID himself in November of 2020. Though he played through the after-effects for the 2021 World Juniors that December, Rossi was struggling. By the time he got to Minnesota Wild camp in January, he’d been diagnosed with a severe case of myocarditis. That wiped out not only the remainder of his 2020-21 season, but also his ability to even exercise for much of the year.

This left Rossi playing some serious catch-up. He got back on the ice for 2021-22, but spent most of the year in the AHL, where he posted a respectable 53 points in 63 games as a rookie pro.

He’d play 19 games in the NHL for Minnesota in 2022-23, still maintaining his rookie status, but only scored a single assist.

By 2023-24, however, Rossi seemed to have caught up. In his Draft+4 season, and still technically his rookie campaign, Rossi played all 82 games for the Wild and scored 40 points. He bumped that up to a career-high 60 points in 82 games the following year, and then in this most recent campaign, he’d managed 13 points in 17 games for Minnesota before being traded to Vancouver. Where, it should be mentioned, he scored 22 points in 33 games despite being hampered by a foot injury.

It can’t be said that Rossi suffered for linemates in Minnesota. His most frequent wingers while there were Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy, two of the best in the game. But one might say that he suffered from a certain lack of opportunity. Rossi only averaged about 17 minutes a night with the Wild, and especially came up short on the power play, where he was stuck on the second unit throughout his tenure – all the while the likes of Kaprizov, Boldy, Mats Zuccarello, and Joel Eriksson Ek enjoyed double-shifts.

In Vancouver, Rossi will definitely have a lower class of winger to play with. Currently, his most likely linemates are Brock Boeser and Liam Öhgren. But at the same time, it’s quite possible that Rossi leads the Canucks’ centres in overall and power play ice-time in 2026-27. And if that’s the case, would a step-up from his career-high of 0.76 points-per-game to something around 0.90 PPG really be all that unexpected?

At age 25, Rossi is late for a breakout, but not entirely outside the range. We had a look at those aforementioned top-23 centres over the past three years to see if any of them had broken out that late, and we found a few worth mentioning.

Nick Suzuki jumped from 0.80 PPG to 0.94 as a 24-year-old, and then up to 1.09 the following year.

Sam Reinhart – who, to be fair, has played as much wing as centre of late – went from 0.74 to 1.05 in his 26-year-old season, though a trade from Buffalo to Florida also had something to do with that.

But our most familiar comparable here is definitely JT Miller. His highest point-per-game season prior to arriving in Vancouver was 0.71. Then, in his first season as a Canuck at age 26, Miller bumped that all the way up to 1.04.

And so, while we’d never call it ‘likely’ that Rossi experiences a sudden increase in production, it’s definitely not impossible. In fact, given his pre-draft projections, his delays in development, and what he’s accomplished in the NHL despite some trying circumstances, one might argue that Rossi has, at least, a far higher chance of one of these late breakouts than does the average 2C-type in this league.

But it’s not going to just happen. A player who put up 60 points next to Kaprizov and Boldy is not going to put up 80 points next to Boeser and Öhgren without some serious self-improvement. The good news is that Rossi has been healthy since the conclusion of the season, and has now had the entire, lengthy summer to work on his game.

He’ll come into the 2026 Training Camp up against an uncertain Pettersson, and that means that, for the first time in his career, Rossi will have a real shot at 1C deployment and minutes, right from the jump.

Can his game also rise to the occasion?