Welcome to the yearly wrap up of the top read articles over the last year!
In Vancouver, there are two players not named Elias Petterson and Quinn Hughes that every fan and analyst has their eyes on — Nils Höglander and Vasili Podkolzin.
The highly-touted prospects got a deep dive into what breakout seasons would look like in a Sept. 6 article by Faber.
That piece came in as the 23rd most read article on Canucks Army this year.
Here’s what a breakout season would look like for the Canucks’ top prospects Nils Höglander and Vasili Podkolzin
In the article, Faber dug into just what those players needed to do. Here’s what Faber wanted to see from Hoglander:
There is a big problem with Nils Höglander and the idea of predicting a breakout season for him.
That problem is that he is currently signed with the Vancouver Canucks and is on just a two month loan to his SHL team. That loan expires after his game on December 12th. After that, he will have to make a decision on if he will be finishing his season in the SHL or making the jump over to North America. He could take up to two weeks to make that decision before his team gets back to SHL play on December 26th.
With that, there are a potential 28 regular-season SHL games for Höglander to participate in.
So if he’s going to have a breakout season, it will have to be in those 28 games because if he is ripping up the SHL, the Canucks will likely want to have him continue his ripping up on their roster.
A good bar to set for a breakout season would be having Nils Höglander be a 0.75 point per game player in those 28 games while also scoring double-digit goals. That’s just three points in every four games, and it’s very doable for Höglander.
And this is what he had to say about Podkolzin:
A comparable for a breakout season could be Pavel Buchnevich. During his draft plus two season, Buchnevich put up 13 goals and 17 assists in 48 KHL games. This was a big jump for Buchnevich, who only had 18 points in his draft +1 season. During his draft +2 season, he played an average of 16:01 through 48 games.
If Podkolzin were to be able to average 16 minutes of ice time, there is no doubt in my mind that he would be able to put up 30 points in the KHL. Right now Podkolzin is not finding himself on either special team units. This will be a big loss for him in the points department. It means that all of his points will be coming at 5-on-5.
So far, Hoglander has scored three goals and 10 points in 16 games, while Podkolzin has scored only six points in 24 games.
On Twitter: @zjlaing