Retiring Vince Carter’s number best way to simplify his complicated Raptors’ legacy
Vince Carter was the Toronto Raptors’ first overarching superstar, which is something worth celebrating. And retiring his number is the best way to do that, writes Michael Grange.
The familiar sounds of training camp have ushered in a new NHL campaign — skates carving up ice, pucks ricocheting off glass, the din of voices and sticks and bodies colliding. After an off-season that saw veteran stars swap sweaters, young phenoms prepare for their first run, and Cup finalists shake up their lineups, we’ve arrived on the cusp of 2024-25.
But before we get there, it’s worth stopping to take stock. We’re half a decade into an offensive renaissance around the league, the NHL’s overall offensive output lifting to levels not seen since the ’90s, the game’s best outdoing themselves on the scoresheet season after season. So, facing that swell of talent, creativity and production, we’ve asked the question: Who are the leaders of this new era? Who are the best of the best?
We turned to our Sportsnet Insiders for an answer, asking them to rank the top 50 players in the NHL at this moment — all positions, all skillsets, one list.
There was only one ground rule: This ranking is forward-looking. It doesn’t factor in legacy or stature in the game — it considers only how the league’s best are expected to perform in 2024-25. The overall ranking below is an amalgam of the Top 50 lists from Insiders across the network. For each Insider’s list, players were assigned points based on how high they finished in that particular ranking — the higher they ranked on an Insider’s list, the more points they accrued.
Each player’s position on the overall ranking is a result of how many total points they collected across all of the Insiders’ lists.
With that, here is the next installment of Sportsnet’s ranking of the Top 50 Players in the NHL — a look at Nos. 40-31:
50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 | 20-11 | 10-1
After years of promise and potential, the 2023-24 campaign saw Noah Dobson take the next step as a clear-cut No. 1 defender. The career performance lifted the rangy rearguard into rarified air among the game’s elite offensive-minded blue-liners — Dobson’s 70 points winding up as the seventh-most posted from the back end, just a handful off the likes of Adam Fox and Victor Hedman. There’s no question he’s thriving as the leader of the Isles’ blue line, pacing the defence corps in minutes during his first campaign in the role and earning Norris Trophy consideration for the first time in his career. Now comes 2024-25 and a chance for the 24-year-old to prove he can not only reach those heights, but stay there.
Long the picture of consistent greatness in an NHL cage, Andrei Vasilevskiy is coming off a season of tumult. First came back surgery and a delayed debut. Then came the rollercoaster, signature starts alternating with nights that saw the former Vezina and Conn Smythe winner look uncharacteristically human. In the end, the campaign finished as a largely forgettable one for the 30-year-old. Still, at his best, there’s little mystery where Vasilevskiy stands among the game’s top netminders. Just look to how his fellow NHLers view him — four years in a row, players around the league have been asked who they would want in net for a single must-win game, and four years in a row, Vasilevskiy’s name came up first. With last year’s back issues hopefully behind him, the veteran takes aim at recovering that elite form in 2024-25.
It took a half-decade for Nico Hischier, but after years of navigating the expectations that came with his draft position, the Devils captain seemed to find something during a sterling campaign in 2022-23. Career marks on the offensive front, dominant form in the other half of the rink, and by the year’s end, the second-most Selke Trophy votes of any two-way practitioner in the league — losing out to the man who’s won the thing more times than anyone else in history. Then came the slide, the Swiss pivot’s 2023-24 going much the way it did for the rest of his club’s leaders — a disappointing step backwards after that flag-planting breakout. A new season brings a chance to right the ship in New Jersey, with a new coach and an improved roster set to aid in that effort. For Hischier himself, it brings an opportunity to prove it was the middling effort last year that was the aberration, not the impressive one a year prior.
Entering the league as a much-hyped blue-line phenom, stepping into an organization not short on chaos, Rasmus Dahlin simply put his head down and pushed forward, chipping away at his steady pursuit of the league’s upper echelon. Over the past two years, he seems to have arrived there. In that span, among all NHL defenders, Dahlin’s collected the fourth-most goals (35), seventh-most points (132), and third-most shots (493), all while logging the second-most minutes per night (25:36). Amid a disappointing Sabres campaign in 2023-24 — the latest in a string of them — Dahlin remained a bright spot, a workhorse for a club whose young core is still finding its footing. Still only 23 years old, the trajectory of his career seems pointed sharply upwards, Dahlin looking every bit the next great blue-liner produced by the Tre Kronor.
At 26, Charlie McAvoy’s only played two seasons in a Bruins sweater that didn’t end with him earning Norris votes. But the nature of the American rearguard’s game has largely kept him out of the conversation about the sport’s best blue-liner. He can produce offensively, but he’s no world-beater on the scoresheet. He can shut down the opposition, but he’s not an out-and-out smothering presence. What separates McAvoy from the rest of the game’s best defencemen, though, is the balance he brings between those two roles — and the bruising, unyielding approach he takes to achieving it. A new top-pairing partner in Nikita Zadorov should help him hone his game further in 2024-25, the big-bodied newcomer sure to shoulder some of that physicality, while allowing McAvoy to lean harder into his offensive instincts.
After the trio of elite campaigns he’s strung together in Dallas, you could be forgiven for forgetting just how young Jason Robertson is. One year after he finished second in Calder Trophy voting in a solid, pandemic-shortened rookie season, the Stars phenom was already earning Hart Trophy votes, putting up a 40-spot in the goals department as a sophomore. In Year 3, he blossomed into one of the game’s brightest young talents, pushing his totals to 46 goals (seventh-most league-wide) and 109 points (sixth-most), while finishing fourth in Hart voting (just behind Connor McDavid, David Pastrnak and Matthew Tkachuk; just ahead of Nathan MacKinnon). The all-world production took a hit in 2023-24 as Dallas brought more balance to its offensive approach. Still, Robertson found other ways to impact the success of one of the West’s best squads, growing as a defensive presence and earning Selke votes for the second straight year. He’s proven he can excel offensively and hold his own on the other end of the puck — now, the task is fine-tuning the balance between those two, and reasserting himself among the game’s very best goal-scorers.
For those wondering what changed in Edmonton last season, what allowed them to finally break through in the post-season and get within one win of hanging a banner at Rogers Place, here’s the answer: Evan Bouchard. The gap between the glimpses of potential Bouchard showed through his first few seasons in Edmonton and what he became in 2023-24 is seismic. The 24-year-old flat out dominated from the back end during his fifth year in an Oilers sweater, stacking 18 goals and 82 points over the course of the campaign — both totals more than doubling what he collected a year previous. Crucially, he was no less prolific in the post-season, amassing 32 points over Edmonton’s 25-game Cup Final run, second only league-wide to Connor McDavid himself, and the third-most for a blue-liner in the history of the playoffs. Having No. 97 running rampant over the league in front of you certainly helps boosts the numbers — and yet, plenty of talented defenders have worn that Oilers crest during McDavid’s time in Edmonton and none have managed to match Bouchard. The young blue-liner proved during the club’s 2024 run that he could perform on both ends of the sheet, that he could hang when the stakes were highest. Now, he just needs to prove he can do it all again.
The Florida sunshine has done wonders for Sam Reinhart, it seems. Rewind back to the 28-year-old’s pre-Panthers days, when he was part of a young Buffalo Sabres core struggling to find its way, and this late-career resurgence seemed far from a sure thing. There was promise, but not dominance. Then came the move south and everything shifted. Year 1 in Panthers threads brought a career season; Year 2, a second run of Selke votes. And in Year 3? He had the campaign of his life — 57 goals (the second-most league-wide), 94 points (12th most league-wide), and, most importantly, a Stanley Cup championship. More impressive still, that flourishing offensive performance didn’t come at the expense of the defensive acumen he showed over the two years prior — instead, Reinhart managed an uptick there too, finishing fourth in Selke voting by the year’s end. The late-blooming breakout came at a perfect time for the versatile forward, earning him a hefty eight-year, $69-million extension to remain in Florida long-term. Now comes the pressure to live up to that price tag, and prove it wasn’t the sole motivation for the career-best campaign.
Even the most staunch Zach Hyman supporters couldn’t have seen it going quite this well when the plucky winger left Toronto and headed west. A steady, hard-working complementary piece on Auston Matthews’ wing during his Maple Leafs years, Hyman has blossomed into something entirely different on McDavid’s. After a couple 20-goal efforts out east, the top-line winger has amassed 117 goals over three seasons in Edmonton — highlighted by a career-altering 54 this past season. The grind of the post-season, of a 25-game run to the Final, did little to slow him down, Hyman pacing the league with 16 goals during Edmonton’s playoff march. Much has been made of how the 32-year-old’s hockey career began, and who he’s gotten to line up with during his time in the big leagues. But you don’t simply fall into a 50-goal season. Playing with No. 97 is a gift to the numbers, no doubt, but the ability to work off of and alongside that level of on-ice genius is a skill in its own right — one Hyman’s shown he has in spades. All eyes will be on the winger to prove he can continue lighting the lamp at that pace. But in truth, the goals were never the foundation of Hyman’s game. It’s the simple, detailed approach that earned him what he’s found in the league so far, and it’s that approach that should set him up for success again in 2024-25.
The game’s newest generational phenom had no shortage of obstacles thrown in his path during Year 1 as a big-leaguer — injuries sidelining one of the few other game-changers on the roster, off-ice chaos upending the lineup further, injuries of his own holding Bedard off the sheet for a spell, and of course, the hurricane of hype that blew in with him as his career began. But from the start, there was one thing that remained undeniable about the young pivot — his all-world skill with the puck on his stick. Undersized, 18 years old, with a supporting cast that left much to be desired, Bedard still managed 22 goals and 61 points through 68 games in a fine rookie campaign, earning a Calder Trophy for his troubles. More importantly, he answered the biggest question asked of him: whether his game-breaking shot could beat netminders at the highest level. He beat them, and danced around the defenders in front of them, and he’s only getting started. With a year of seasoning under his belt, and a noticeably improved forward corps around him — Taylor Hall has returned from injury, while Tyler Bertuzzi and Teuvo Teravainen join Chicago’s top six — a next-level sophomore effort seems on the horizon for young Bedard.
Check back Wednesday for Nos. 30-21 on Sportsnet’s ranking of the Top 50 Players in the NHL.
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