If you’re not watching the Montréal Canadiens every night, you probably don’t know a whole lot about team captain Nick Suzuki, and let’s face it, over Suzuki’s career so far, the Habs haven’t exactly been appointment viewing.
At 25th in wins and points, and 23rd in goals for since 2019-20 when Suzuki broke into the league, the Canadiens have been a tough sell for those who aren’t diehard fans for a long stretch, especially outside of the 2021 Stanley Cup Final run.
Suzuki himself is clearly a very good player, but his stat line doesn’t jump out at you on career terms, with 136 goals and 372 points in 451 regular season games. However, for those of us who have watched his career unfold game by game, the ascension we’re seeing for the 25-year-old centre is not that surprising.
Originally, I had planned to write one big, definitive analysis piece on Suzuki, but the more I wrote about him, the more there was to say, so welcome to part one of a series on Nick Suzuki, the captain of the Montreal Canadiens.
With games remaining on the schedule in the NHL’s 2024-25, Suzuki has already ensured he will top the point-per-game mark for the first time in his career, tied for 12th in scoring league-wide, and sixth among centres. What’s more impressive though is that Suzuki has managed to increase his production each year of his career, despite wild fluctuations in team strength, linemate consistency, and linemate strength, all while playing the highest-leverage minutes possible on hockey’s most historic franchise, while shouldering the mantle of captain through that franchise’s first true rebuild, as the first captain in team history of Asian descent.
Pressure is something we always talk about in elite sports, and it’s something Suzuki has never shied away from; a critical component to what makes him a perfect captain in this market.
Signs of what’s to come
Back in Suzuki’s final year of Junior hockey in the Ontario Hockey League when he was just 19 years old, he was traded from the Owen Sound Attack to the Guelph Storm in Guelph’s bid for an OHL championship and Memorial Cup. To say Suzuki didn’t disappoint would be an understatement.
En route to lifting the J. Ross Robertson Cup, Suzuki racked up 16 goals and 42 points in 28 playoff games, leading the Storm by 12 points, and leading every other player in the OHL by 11 points. Not only that, but Guelph was up against it, down 3-0 against the London Knights in its second-round series. How did Suzuki react? Scoring in each game and putting up 11 points over the next four games as he engineered a reverse sweep for the Storm.
The Storm weren’t quite able to capture the Memorial Cup, falling to the Rouyn-Noranda Huskies in the semifinal, but Suzuki notched three goals and seven points in those extra four games, finishing second in scoring among all players at the 2019 Memorial Cup tournament.
Suzuki’s propensity for showing up in big games and big moments didn’t take long to appear when he joined the Canadiens the following season. The COVID-19 pandemic cut his rookie season short, and allowed the middling Canadiens access to a play-in round against the Pittsburgh Penguins to qualify for the playoffs.
In his first NHL playoff game, Suzuki stripped veteran defenceman Brian Dumoulin of the puck at the Canadiens’ blue line, creating a two-on-one with Joel Armia. Electing not to pass, Suzuki ripped a wrist shot glove-side on Tristan Jarry for a goal.
He recorded seven points in 10 playoff games, with his two best performances coming while the Habs faced elimination at the hands of the Philadelphia Flyers. Suzuki set up the tying goal in Game 5 by Brendan Gallagher, then scored the game-winning goal. In Game 6 Suzuki scored both Canadiens goals in a 3-2 loss.
We also got our first taste of Suzuki’s intensity showing up in gamesmanship, with him patting disgraced former NHLer (due to the 2018 Team Canada scandal surrounding the World Juniors) Carter Hart on the head, causing Kelly Hrudey to flip out.
The Ascension
When Suzuki broke into the league, certain aspects of his game were strong right away, but there was a learning curve. Showing elite defensive instincts right away, he earned the trust of head coach Claude Julien to play a high-leverage role, but generating offence consistently was difficult. He continued to show up in big moments, earning the trust of Dominique Ducharme as well, and leading the Habs in points as they rattled off an unlikely trip to the Stanley Cup Final the following season.
While it would be fun to go over Suzuki’s excellent playoff performance in that run, it’s the refining of his game since then that we need to dig into. Let’s start with Evolving Hockey‘s Goals Above Replacement (GAR) and expected Goals Above Replacement (xGAR) metrics to give a general look at his impact on the Canadiens. What GAR attempts to do is quantify the impact a player has on several different areas in the game to approximate the goal differential a player contributes to their team as an individual.
Using the same colours from Evolving Hockey’s own breakdowns for clarity, we can break down Suzuki’s impact on even-strength offence (EVO), even-strength defence (EVD), power-play offence (PPO), short-handed defence (SHD), penalties taken (Take), and penalties drawn (Draw) compared to a replacement-level player in the NHL.
Playing a middle-six role in his first two seasons. Suzuki was a positive impact player right away, but as the team around him was pulled apart following the trip to the Stanley Cup Final, Suzuki was forced into a bigger role as the number-one centre for a team in free fall.
Suddenly in the position of needing to produce high-level offence just for his team to be competitive, Suzuki’s defensive impact dropped off significantly for a time as he adjusted to being the team’s offensive engine. Over time he continued to add skills and experience to his game, raising the bar each season.
Suzuki has raised his game so significantly that at the time of this writing, only five centres in the NHL have managed a higher GAR total this season than he has. To accomplish that level of performance without a second-line centre to draw some of the opponent’s top checkers is pretty absurd when your name isn’t Connor McDavid.
Goals Above Replacement tells us the resulting impacts of Suzuki’s play, while xGAR attempts to give us an idea of what a player’s impact should be over the long term, removing some of the randomness inherent in the sport to focus more on a player’s inputs than outputs.
What I find interesting in looking at the expected results is that Suzuki hasn’t just found ways to produce more offence in multiple situations, he’s also managed to recover his defensive impact in a much more difficult role after his first two seasons as the team’s top pivot weren’t so kind.
Oddly enough though, for those of us who have watched Suzuki throughout his career, I think most would agree that his defensive play has never dipped; it’s the team around him that struggled. To watch Suzuki 82 times per year or more is to appreciate nuance, because he is a very unique player in this league.
While Suzuki’s improved play hasn’t translated into drawn calls, with the lowest number of penalties drawn since his rookie season and about half the rate of the previous four seasons, he’s made up for that by just not taking penalties. In fact, Suzuki has taken just 3 minor infractions through 78 games, the most recent one occurring in January.
The uphill grind
While everything is about to change even more in Montreal with the arrival of Ivan Demidov, as the fortunes of the team have already been elevated by the arrival of Lane Hutson, we can’t ignore that Suzuki and his line with Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky have been pushing the team uphill against long odds for a long stretch now.
When Carey Price was the superstar the Habs were built around, we talked a lot about goal support available to him to record wins, and the pressure of entering almost every game knowing that goal support wasn’t going to be great.
With Suzuki it’s a little bit different because he can impact both ends of the ice in a way that goalies can’t, but there is an non-insignificant gap between what the Suzuki line is capable of, and what happens when he’s off the ice.
Opponents facing Montreal, as fun as this team has been, are going to game plan their defence around Suzuki’s line every time. That opponents have been unable to hold them in check despite not having to spread their defensive stoppers out against the rest of the lineup like they need to do against most playoff teams is a testament to just how good they’re becoming.
To illustrate this, and I stress that this is illustrative and not definitive, let’s look at how big the gap is in offence created between first and second lines across the NHL using Evolving Hockey’s data and expected-goals model. The reason I want to use both is to illustrate both actual goal pressure that opponents would gameplan for, and scoring pressure inputs. This kind of analysis is tricky because of sample sizes, injuries, and roles, but it gives an idea of the situation the Suzuki line is in nightly.
The average first line in the NHL this season produces 3.46 goals per 60 minutes at five-on-five, while the average second line produces 2.99. That creates an expected gap of nearly half a goal per hour between your top two units. Team balances vary, but that’s the average. Going by expected goals, the average first line produces 3.02 per 60 minutes at five-on-five and the average second line 2.73, just a little more than half the gap in actual goals, which could be an argument for high-end scoring skill.
How does Suzuki’s and the Canadiens’ second line stack up? For starters, I had to compare them to the Dvorak line, because the second line has been a mess and in flux all season, so it would create a false gap between the follow-up pressure teams have to actually deal with.
As it turns out, the Suzuki line has the third-largest gap in goal production per hour over their team’s second line in the NHL. Ahead of it is Columbus’s main trio, an outlier because the top line is killer and the rest of its lineup is so inconsistently deployed that there’s few reasonable second lines you could come up with, and Edmonton, but only when they load McDavid and Leon Draisaitl onto the same line, which is not their most common setup.
It could be argued relatively easily that on a night in and night out basis, no top line in the league outside of Columbus faces as much pressure to perform for their team as the Canadiens’ trio of Suzuki, Caufield, and Slafkovsky. Under that pressure, pushing through a rebuild toward their first playoff berth all together, they’re the sixth-highest scoring line in the NHL in goals per hour at five-on-five.
Martin St-Louis has trusted that line to get it done, keeping them together for over 650 minutes this season, the fourth-most used trio in the NHL. They continue to reward him, led by Suzuki himself.
Now that we’ve gone over the obviously high-level performance from Suzuki, and his growth as a player, in the next article we’ll get to the how.
Andrew Berkshire is the former managing editor of Eyes on the Prize, and the founder of Game Over Network Inc. A Canadian, employee-owned sports media startup focused on platforming young creators across the country. Find Andrew live on YouTube after Habs games with Game Over Montreal, where you can also find Marc Dumont, Kay Imam, and Conor Tomalty to bring you interactive postgame analysis. You can join the Game Over Network’s Discord, and support us on Patreon as we employ over 30 young sports journalists and analysts across Canada’s seven NHL markets.
Social Media links: [Bluesky] [TikTok] [Instagram] [Threads] [Facebook] [LinkedIn]
