In a season in which the Vancouver Canucks have desperately needed some bright spots, Jonathan Lekkerimäki is looking particularly shiny these days.

The 22-year-old right winger was drafted 15th overall in 2022, and after four post-draft seasons of inconsistent development and seemingly constant injuries, many had lost faith in him. But then Lekkerimäki hit the ground running for 2026-27, and hasn’t looked back yet.

Through the first 14 games of the season, Lekkerimäki has six goals and six assists for 12 points. Prior to this season, he had a total of five goals and nine points in 37 career games. It’s still early, having not quite hit the 1/5^th mark on the year, but it’s certainly looking like a breakout season in the making.

We’ve already talked about how the context of Lekkerimäki’s offseason, which involved a recovery from shoulder surgery and thus not the full amount of time to prepare, makes the way he has started extra impressive.

And now that he’s continuing to pick up steam, it’s time to apply another layer of impressive context, which is the company that Lekkerimäki has begun to keep on the stat charts.

Lekkerimäki is not a rookie. To qualify as an NHL rookie, one has to have not played more than 25 games in any one NHL season, which Lekkerimäki hasn’t – he played 24 his first year and 13 last year. But there’s an additional qualifier that says a rookie can’t have played six or more games in each of any two preceding seasons, and that’s what disqualifies Lekkerimäki. As such, last year was technically his rookie year, and he’s now a sophomore.

If he were a rookie, however, it’s worth noting that Lekkerimäki would be a Calder Trophy candidate at this point in the season, and perhaps the leading one.

Currently, the actual rookie scoring leader is Gavin McKenna, the most recent first overall pick. McKenna has 11 points in 16 games, which is both a point behind Lekkerimäki’s total and a big step behind in terms of points-per-game. After McKenna, a large group of rookies are tied with nine points each, and then the list drops off.

In terms of goal scoring, McKenna is also tied for the rookie lead with five, alongside Roman Kantserov of the Chicago Blackhawks. Again, Lekkerimäki has them both beat.

Of course, a non-rookie beating out some rookies can only be so impressive. And if he were a rookie, Lekkerimäki would be on the older side at 22. But in terms of NHL players as a whole, 22 is still pretty young, and falls beneath the traditional ‘young player’ umbrella of ‘under-23.’

And if we look at Lekkerimäki in the context of all under-23 players in the league right now, he still holds elite company.

There are only three under-23 players who have outscored Lekkerimäki thus far in the 2026-27 season. They are Macklin Celebrini (15 points in 11 games), Leo Carlsson (15 points in 12 games), and Easton Cowan (14 points in 15 games). Lekkerimäki is tied for fourth place with Logan Cooley, who has 12 points in 13 games.

So, when we said elite company, we really meant elite company. Celebrini, Carlsson, and Cooley are all widely-recognized 1Cs already in this league, and two of those players just signed some of the largest contracts in NHL history.

Lekkerimäki, and Cowan, to his credit, really stand out as the new arrivals in this crowd.

Lekkerimäki is, at the heart of it all, a goal-scorer, and his six goals so far don’t just have him on pace for about 35 in total; they’re another area in which he sits in elite company. Only two other under-23 players have more goals this season, those being Matvei Michkov (nine goals in 15 games) and Beckett Sennecke (seven goals in 12 games.) Lekkerimäki is tied with Cowan and Jimmy Snuggerud in third place.

It’s not saying much to say that all of those players we listed play on better teams than does Lekkerimäki, because the Canucks are far and away the worst team in the NHL right now, but most of them play on outright good teams, with the exception of Michkov. That Lekkerimäki is getting all this done on the 2026-27 Canucks is just one more reason to be impressed with his start.

Naturally, the quality of the team around him means that most of Lekkerimäki’s analytic stats aren’t nearly as impressive, but that will come with time and the improvement of the Canucks as a whole. For now, that he’s scoring this much is definitely enough.

It’s also worth mentioning that most of the players we’ve listed above, aside from Cowan and Snuggerud, were drafted higher than Lekkerimäki in their own respective draft years.

To summarize, Lekkerimäki, in his first full NHL season, would be the leading rookie scorer this year… if he were still technically a rookie. That aside, he’s the fourth-leading under-23 point-scorer in the NHL right now, and the third-leading under-23 goal-scorer.

And, if his latest game against the Anaheim Ducks is any indication, Lekkerimäki is only heating up as he goes.

For many, the measure of a good year for Lekkerimäki in 2026-27 was just him establishing himself as a full-time NHLer. But he’s already done a fair bit more than that, and in doing so has pushed himself back into the forefront of the Canucks’ big rebuild picture.

With most of the Canucks’ ambitions aimed at the long-term right now, it’s nice to have something like this to celebrate in the short-term. Especially when it also matters in the long run.