After having surgery on his right knee in mid-March, Andrei Svechnikov missed the rest of the 2022-23 season and the first eight games of this season while recovering. He returned but then missed six more games due to an upper-body injury in November.
That’s the long way of saying that 2023 wasn’t his year.
But Svechnikov has gotten a head start on 2024 — when he’s NSJ’s pick to be the Comeback of the Year.
In the Hurricanes’ final three games of 2023, the 23-year-old totaled four goals and three assists, including scoring his third career regular season hat trick against Montreal on Dec. 28.
“I feel like I’m doing kind of the same thing,” Svechnikov said after his hat trick. “Maybe just feel a little bit lighter, all that stuff. Hands, skating. Whenever you feel that, you kind of don’t worry about anything.”
That’s surely music to the Hurricanes’ ears.
Svechnikov’s return to form — he started 2024 with two goals in a 6-1 win over the rival Rangers on Tuesday — has coincided with him joining a line with Teuvo Teravainen and Sebastian Aho, who had a career-best 11 points in those three games.
If the trio can continue their elite play, it could be a boon for Carolina. While the two Finns have long had superb chemistry, Svechnikov, Aho and Teravainen have struggled to click as a line over the past few seasons. Since the start of the 2021-22 season, the SAT Line had scored just five times at 5-on-5 over more than 190 minutes until the last three games when it totaled three goals in under 29 minutes.
The three players have also helped the Hurricanes’ power play move up to No. 5 in the league entering the new year.
The hope now is that Svechnikov can both remain healthy and deliver on everything expected of him when Carolina took him second overall in 2018.
That means not only putting up points but also continuing to be one of the few true power forwards in the NHL.
With 21 points and 49 hits in 22 games, Svechnikov is one of just two players — along with Vancouver’s J.T. Miller — who is averaging more than two hits and close to one point per game.
Many of the NHL’s superstars — Sidney Crosby, Evgeny Malkin, Alex Ovechkin, Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews and even rookie Connor Bedard, to name a few — fulfilled their promise by their first season.
Others, like Nathan MacKinnon, took time to develop into unstoppable forces.
MacKinnon, the No. 1 pick by Colorado in 2013, played 300 games in his first four seasons and had 75 goals and 206 points — 0.69 points per game. He’s averaged nearly twice that — 1.37 points per game — in the next 445 games.
Svechnikov’s first 300 games were slightly better — he had 101 goals and 227 points (0.76 points per game). Svechnikov has increased his point production in his last 69 games, totaling 58 points (0.84 per game). This season, he’s averaged 0.95 points per game despite working his way back from the knee injury.
Reaching MacKinnon’s level — he’s probably the early front-runner for the Hart Trophy as the league’s top player this season — may be too high of an expectation for Svechnikov. But if he can go from being a 60-point player to a point-per-game player, the Hurricanes’ fortunes will improve.
Add in his physicality — who will ever forget his series-altering hit on Boston’s Hampus Lindholm two seasons ago? — speed, creativity and work ethic, and Svechnikov has the potential to be a unicorn in the NHL.
And 2024 could very well be when all of that is realized.
