Carolina Hurricanes: The Nino Niederreiter Revenge Tour

After an underwhelming 2019-20 campaign, Nino Niederreiter is back to his old prolific self with the Carolina Hurricanes after 10 games played so far. In those 10 games, Nino has registered 5 goals and 1 assist for 6 total points.

These stats have Nino firmly planted in 3rd place on the Carolina Hurricanes roster in goals scored, and 6th in total points behind Dougie Hamilton, Jordan Staal, Sebastian Aho, Vincent Trocheck, and Andrei Svechnikov. This is about as elite of company as you’ll find on the Carolina Hurricanes these days, so Nino in the top 10 of point-getters and top 5 of goalscorers is a huge step forward from his performance last season.

Around a month ago, I wrote an article about which Carolina Hurricanes players would likely have a rebound season this year, and none other than Nino Niederreiter was top of the bill in that piece. Here we all are, 10 games into the 2020-21 NHL regular season, and Nino is performing well above expectations at the moment given how he finished last season (11 goals, 18 assists for 29 points in 67 games played).

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Nino has almost hit the halfway marker from his goal total last year in less than a dozen games; this is due in no small part to being given ample ice time alongside players like Sebastian Aho, Vincent Trocheck, and Andrei Svechnikov.

All three of these players make virtually anyone they’re on the ice with better, but none so much as Nino Niederreiter (and maybe Brock McGinn, but I talked about that yesterday).

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll also notice that I called for the Nino Niederreiter Revenge Tour to fully commence this season after the Carolina Hurricanes very first goal in the 2020-21 NHL regular season was scored by (you guessed it) Nino Niederreiter.

I’m not saying Nino Niederreiter is a gamebreaker; while he still very much has a ton left in the tank and a very solid role to play in Carolina, I’m not entirely sure we’ll ever get the 30-points-in-36-games version of Nino that we got when we first traded Victor Rask (one for one) for him, and that is just fine with me as long as he stabilizes and keeps the groove he’s found this year.

It would certainly be nice to have Nino return to near point-per-game performance, but he still very much has a shot at being a reliable 20 goal/50 point guy going forward. If he does end up overperforming this season, though, the Carolina Hurricanes are sure to be even more of a force to be reckoned with once Sebastian Aho and Teuvo Teravainen really get the offensive pistons firing on all cylinders.