This is always a fun question to ask in the middle of August. Off the top of my head my best guesses would be Brandon Saad, Seth Jones and Brandon Dubinsky. Saad and Jones are already really good players and are both young enough that you would expect them to continue to improve and be even better next season. Dubinksy has been a really solid player for years now but has dealt with injuries which partially explains why he's been so underrated, (though maybe participating in the World Cup of Hockey will change that). He should be the Jackets top line centre and be in for another good season.
Dom Luszbxhsyxb of Hockey Graphs posted this tweet on Monday with his projections for each team’s best three players.
His projections are based upon his stat called game score. Game score is a very simple idea, it tries to answer the question “Who had the best game last night?” You may have heard of game score before as it is more common in baseball and basketball. What game score tries to do is take everything a player did in a particular game and assign a value to how good that game was.
Dom kept it simple and his game score for hockey includes the following stats:
The stats I used are goals, primary assists, secondary assists, shots on goal, blocked shots, penalty differential, faceoffs, 5-on-5 corsi differential, 5-on-5 goal differential.
For goalies he used goals against and saves.
He then weighed each stat and when you tally everything up you get a players game score. For more information of Game Score and how it’s calculated I would recommend reading Dom’s piece on Hockey Graphs: Introducing Game Score, which you can find
here.
The highest Game Score recorded since 2007-08 was 7.1 scored by Sam Gagne during his eight point game. The highest score by a goalie was 5.9 by Ben Scrivens during his 59 save shutout over the Sharks.
After getting individual games Dom went ahead and got game scores over a whole season. The best players should play higher quality games and that would show up in Game Score. Last season the leader per game was Patrick Kane and since 2011 the leader is Sidney Crosby.
Now that we have a basic understanding of game score we can go back to the projections. Dom forecasts the best Jacket players to be Brandon Saad, Nick Foligno and Scott Hartnell. Saad was to be expected, he should lead the team in goals and points again this season.
This model is clearly expecting a bounce back season from Foligno. Foligno lead the Blue Jackets in Corsi last season with 51.87% per
Corsica. Foligno could easily be the Corsi leader again for the Jackets and if he can shoot better than 8.1%, his career shooting percentage is 11.8% so a rebound is possible, he could be in for a good season.
Hartnell is the real interesting name here. He didn’t have the best possession this past season, though he did finish in a tie for third on the team with 49 points. Considering his age I think its possible Hartnell can replicate this past season but unlikely he ever gets back to his 60 point ways. There is nothing wrong with Hartnell repeating this past season; the issue though would be if that is the third best season on the Jackets. That would be mean that Alexander Wennberg didn’t breakout, that Boone Jenner regressed, that Seth Jones didn’t take a step forward, and that would not bode well for the Jackets season.
The Jackets need those young players to take big steps forward for them to have any hope of sniffing the playoffs. If not they could be in for another long season.
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