Toronto Maple Leafs center Tyler Bozak skates with the puck during the shootout against the New Jersey Devils at Air Canada Centre.
The numbers are really quite remarkable.
After 24 games, Tyler Bozak sits tied for 12th in the NHL in goals scored, ahead of superstars such as John Tavares, Patrick Kane and Martin St. Louis.
He has 23 points – good for top 20 – and is on pace for nearly 80 despite never hitting the 50-point mark in the past.
It's a hot streak, there's no doubt. And Bozak is really a terrific story.
Undersized and undrafted while playing in British Columbia's Junior A circuit, the Regina native spent only a year-and-a-half in college before jumping straight to the Leafs as a free agent.
By then, he was already 23 and struggled to produce, putting up only 134 points in his first four NHL seasons despite getting ample power-play time and nearly 85 per cent of his even strength minutes with Phil Kessel, one of the top goal scorers in the game.
For years, the debate has raged over whether Bozak was a suitable first-line centre for a team with serious playoff aspirations, an argument that went beyond the point production given how weak Toronto's top unit has typically been defensively.
That history has meant that his recent explosion hasn't become the feel-good, underdog-done-good story it might have somewhere else: His detractors have long since lined up on one side and his supporters on the other.
Neither appears to be budging, despite all the goals.
"I mean I think I'm used to it now," Bozak said of the controversy. "It's been five years of the same thing over and over. I'm surprised they don't get sick of talking about it."
The case for Bozak
Bozak is a unique player in the NHL. He's not particularly big or fast or strong and doesn't have the typical offensive attributes one would expect in a minute-eating, playmaking centre.
But he is great on breakaways – as evidenced by his 58-per-cent career-success rate in the shootout, tops among active players (more than 15 attempts) – and has used those skills to score two pretty shorthanded goals this year.
He also wins plenty of faceoffs, with a career success rate of 53 per cent that's only a percentage or two below the game's elite.
His relationship with Kessel is another plus, as the pair became inseparable almost from the moment Bozak arrived back in 2009, with the two of them earning the nicknames Bert and Ernie from teammates.
And Kessel has become one of the league's premier goal scorers with his off-ice roommate as his centre.
Generally speaking, Bozak is very popular with his teammates and coaches, who are called on to defend him from time to time.
"It's great to see him having success: He's a big part of that line and he has been for a lot of years," captain Dion Phaneuf said on Wednesday. "The way he's playing now and putting up big numbers, it's well deserved. He works extremely hard."
"Bozie's been a guy that's created a lot of offence over the last little while," coach Randy Carlyle added. "We hope that continues."
The case against Bozak
Often the divide on Bozak involves analytics, in large part because these new stats paint a rather ugly portrait of what's happening when he's on the ice.
Bozak's career possession rating, for example, is 46.4 per cent, which ranks him in the bottom 25 out of the 261 forwards that have played at least 3,000 even-strength minutes since he entered the league.
The Leafs have been routinely outshot over that span, too, and both those issues have remained unchanged even as he has produced more offensively.
As a result, at even strength the past two seasons, Toronto has scored only five more goals than it has allowed with him on the ice, an alarmingly low number given Kessel's penchant for routinely netting 30 every year.
The only centres that have played big minutes and had more goals scored against a minute they're on the ice, meanwhile, are Jason Spezza and Sam Gagner, two pivots known for their defensive deficiencies.
The defensive issues plaguing the Leafs' top line are hardly all on Bozak – no member of it is particularly strong in their own zone – but they're compounded by not having a strong presence down the middle, especially when tasked with facing opponents' best players.
So there are legitimate questions over how good the Leafs can be if their top line is that porous and if Bozak can continue to produce points the way he has. His on-ice shooting percentage the past 82 games is at more than 12 per cent, which is in the same range as Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Steven Stamkos in that span.
That's generally unsustainable for all but the best players in the world, and an indication Bozak won't be able to produce at a 70-point rate long term.
"I'm playing where I am, and the team's doing well, I'm doing well," Bozak said. "So hopefully we can stay consistent and keep it up."