Rookie Point Projections for the 2022-23 NHL season: Which first-year players will break out?

DISCLAIMER: Attempting to project how a first-year player will fare in their debut NHL season is an exercise fraught with pitfalls. Will the coaching staff trust them? Will they handle speed and physicality? Will a top-six option quickly get injured and open up an unforeseen spot? Will I simply get it wrong? 

All of these factors and many more come into play when projecting young players but especially those without accrued service in the top league in the world. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to run away scared and hide. It just means we need to step a little further out onto the ledge. To put ourselves out there and hope a gust of wind doesn’t come startling its way by and dislodge our footing. 

I say ‘our’ a lot there, but this is on me. These are my personal projections. I don’t have a fancy model crunching and munching out the metrics for me to fall back and point a finger at if things go south. There’s no ‘tweaking’ this model. Believe me, I’ve been trying to tweak it for years. 

And so, upon specific request, I present the point projections for all the players who could conceivably suit up for a tangible amount of their rookie seasons. We'll break down the top-five forwards, the top-three defenders, and the top-two netminders. Those and all of the rest are in a handy-dandy list at the bottom.