from Gare Joyce of Sportsnet,

For the most part, professional sport is a system of seniority-driven, pay-your-dues hierarchies. The tag “rookie” connotes “unproven” and can hang out there almost as a pejorative. And the NHL might be the league that most marginalizes the last guy in the door. That thinking is there at the micro level: Veterans initiate rookies. And it’s there at the macro level: Entry-level players have to wait the longest to attain free agency and real market value—seven years of dues-paying before they get a sniff at it. For those who follow the game, from the stands or the press box, the history and the status quo exercise a powerful hold on conventional wisdom: No matter who you are, who you think you are or who people presume you to be, you have to earn it first.

This preamble leads us to the burning question: How high should a rookie place on a list of the NHL’s most important players before he has skated a single professional shift? McDavid is, after all, a mere teenager, one whose ball-hockey net is at this moment leaning against the garage of his family’s home in suburban Newmarket, Ont.; one who, on the eve of the NHL Combine this spring, went to his high school prom; one who seems bound and determined to be an average 18-year-old, or at least one with an A-student’s vocabulary. He looks not like the greats spread across these pages but rather a kid who would stand outside the arena, waiting to chase down their autographs.

And here again we come to an exploration of micro and macro pictures. Micro: The measure of a player’s influence on a franchise is in the hands of those who vote, subjectively, for the Hart Trophy, or those who do some sort of objective statistical analysis of every skater and goalie in the league. Macro: The measure of a player’s influence on the league is harder to decide and impossible to quantify. Is it more about name recognition or what the name is associated with? Is it earnings or earning potential, on the ice and off?

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