Currently on pace for 41 goals, Jake DeBrusk’s first of seven seasons with the Vancouver Canucks has gotten started about as anyone could have hoped.

After a bit of a feeling out process in the month of October, where DeBrusk tallied just four assists, the 28-year-old winger has come alive since November 1st. Since that date, only Mikko Rantanen has scored the same amount of goals that DeBrusk has with 14.

Not only has DeBrusk been one of the game’s best scorers early on this year, but he’s also emerged as one of the sharpest free agent signings of the entire offseason now that the dust has settled a bit. Among UFAs who signed this past offseason, only Jake Guentzel — the summer’s big fish and highest paid free agent at $9 million annually — has more goals than DeBrusk this season.

Some players who signed for equal or more money than what the Canucks are paying DeBrusk this year are Elias Lindholm, Jonathan Marchessault, and Steven Stamkos. Even with his goalless month of October while he acclimated himself to his new surroundings, DeBrusk is outscoring all of those players.

And there’s reason to believe that his current goalscoring stretch is a bit more sustainable

DeBrusk has long had a reputation as one of the game’s streakiest scorers, but he’s never had a stretch of streakiness that went on for this long at any point in his career before. DeBrusk picked up that title by scoring in spurts numerous times in Boston. It would be a few games with multiple goals, then a few games with no goals, then back to scoring, then back to a dry spell, and by now, you get the point.

At the time of this writing, DeBrusk has 11 goals in his last 10 games dating back to November 23rd against Ottawa, when he scored two goals and added an assist. Not only is that among the best stretches of goal scoring as any player in the league, it’s the best stretch of DeBrusk’s career, and by a fairly considerable margin.

Prior to this year, DeBrusk’s “streakiness” has mostly equated to three or four game stretches where he finds the back of the net before going the same amount of time — and typically more — without scoring afterwards.

The closest stretch like this DeBrusk has ever experienced was in the 2018-19 season, when he scored nine goals over 12 games. It was an impressive stretch for sure, but it also wasn’t quite like this one. It was also over five years ago.

Last season, DeBrusk’s best month of the season was in January, when he scored six goals. Three of those goals came in consecutive games to end the month, and the other three came at the start of the month over the span of four games. In between those stretches though, DeBrusk went three games without a single point.

And that’s what’s made this stretch so unique to DeBrusk’s career: he’s logged just two games over this current span without scoring a goal: November 27th against Pittsburgh and December 8th against Tampa Bay.

In every other game since November 23rd, DeBrusk has scored a goal. For almost a month, DeBrusk has scored in all but two of the games he’s appeared in.

Unlike what was the case for Brock Boeser last season, DeBrusk’s NHL Edge Data doesn’t show that he’s enjoying this high goal total as a result of scoring from different spots of the ice. DeBrusk’s bread and butter has always been the front of the net, and that hasn’t changed this season:

Rather, the biggest difference that stands out this season for DeBrusk is that this is the first chance he’s had to play with a centre of Elias Pettersson’s calibre on a regular basis. It’s also his first real chance to be “the guy” and play on a top line with regularity. His total ice time average is the highest its ever been in his career this season with the Canucks. And as long as he keeps scoring goals, it’s unlikely any of these things will change.

Will DeBrusk break his career-high goals tally of 27? He’s on pace for 41 right now, and as somebody who predicted he’d reach 30 — and admittedly started to feel a tad nervous about that prediction after a quiet October — I say he does it.