The top performances from Week 1 of the NHL season

Each day I choose one stand-out player from the night before (sometimes via Twitter vote, sometimes by my dictatorial whims) and edit together a two-minute compilation of their most noteworthy plays and puck touches. The aim is to highlight some of the league’s best or most promising talents, showing off both the flashy and subtle aspects of their game in order to give casual fans or those who only follow one team a chance to enjoy what they bring to the sport.

For an analyst like me, they also provide the opportunity to connect the dots between data and video, illuminating how these players generate their results and where the stats may not tell the full story about a guy’s upside or even current impact. I don't always pick whoever had the most points or even necessarily the most impressive performance; the priority is to choose an interesting variety of players.

I post these clips every morning on Twitter using the hashtag #NHLPotN (NHL Performer of the Night) and have accumulated an archive of over 70 as of this writing. But while I can offer a bit of bite-sized extra analysis in the thread, the medium isn’t well-suited to a deeper look. So these articles will be an opportunity to reflect on these top performances of the week, analyze the players more closely, and place these games in their broader statistical context to get more value out of them and tell a more nuanced story. {{