The Toronto Maple Leafs are a young, rebuilding team. This has left them prone to having a lot of rookies in the lineup every single night - you know, Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, Connor Brown, Zach Hyman, Nikita Soshnikov, and Nikita Zaitsev.
And when three of those guys are in the top five for rookie scoring across the NHL, well, you know you’ve got some good rookies.
But that’s ignoring the other guys. And now, Connor Brown has had his chance to shine, now having had his first multi-goal game in his NHL career. Not bad for a sixth round pick!
But as different as he is from the Leafs’ top rookies, he’s now got something in common with them. Via the Elias Sports Bureau:
Brown is the fourth rookie to produce a multiple-goal game for the Leafs this season, after Auston Matthews, William Nylander and Mitch Marner had already done so. This is the first time that the Maple Leafs have had four rookies record multi-goal games for them in one season since 1982-83, when Walt Poddubny, Peter Ihnacak, Dan Daoust and Frank Nigro were the rookie quartet. The only other NHL team since 2006-07 to have four rookies with multiple-goal games in the same season was the 2013-14 Lightning (Ondrej Palat, Tyler Johnson, J.T. Brown, Mark Barberio.)
There are still 65 games left this season. That’s plenty of time for another rookie to have a multi-goal game. Who do you think will be up next?