The Best Line in Hockey, Young Guns Style

I busted a lot of 2013-14 Upper Deck Series Two last fall. A lot. I live in Florida, so there isn’t much hockey available at the best of times and the Upper Deck line was about the only thing in the big box retailers around me when I got back into collecting last fall. As someone who hadn’t looked at a hockey card in about 20 years, I was blown away by the quality of the photography. I decided it would be fun to build the base set. That was, until I began opening dupe after dupe after dupe. After three blasters and probably a dozen or so loose packs, I had about half the base set – and an even taller stack of extras. I was done.

But one place I turned out very lucky was the Young Guns. Since moving to Florida, I’ve become a Tampa Bay Lightning fan, so there were three Young Guns I really wanted – LW Ondrej Palat, C Tyler Johnson and RW Nikita Kucherov.

The first of my three Target-bought blasters turned up Kucherov, who, as of last fall, was probably the least desirable of the three. That’s not the case anymore. The 21-year-old, playing his first full season, is currently tied for second on the Lightning – and 11th in the NHL – in scoring. Kucherov was a dominant junior scorer and was widely considered one of the top offensive prospects in hockey going into the 2011 draft. But teams were apparently scared off by the fact that he was Russian (and therefore someone who might choose to stay in the KHL rather than coming over to North America) so the Lightning were able to steal him in the second round. He’s one of several highly regarded Russian prospects the Lightning have gambled on over the last few years, including top goaltending prospect Andrei Vasilevskiy who just recently made his NHL debut and who will hopefully get his own Young Guns card when Upper Deck  releases this year’s Series II.

In the second blaster was Johnson, an even bigger steal for the Lightning, who was signed as an undrafted free agent out of the Spokane Chiefs of the Western Hockey League. Johnson, who finished third in the voting for the Calder trophy last year, is the Lightning’s leading scorer this year (yes, ahead of Steven Stamkos) and is currently sixth in the NHL in scoring with 45 points in 42 games. The Tampa Bay Times recently wrote a fantastic profile of Johnson, who was just named to his first All-Star team.

Finally, in the second-to-last pack of the third blaster, I found the guy who I think is the best of the three: Palat, whom the Lightning, yes, stole as a seventh-round, overage pick in the 2011 draft. That’s right. Not only did the Lightning get him in the final round of the draft, they did so in his second year of eligibility. Palat was the runner-up to Colorado’s Nathan McKinnon in rookie-of-the-year voting last year. This Czech-born winger is fifth on the Lightning in scoring this year, but he’s also already one of the best defensive forwards in hockey.

In fact, Kucherov, Johnson and Palat – who play on a line that’s been dubbed the “Triplets” in Tampa – have been one of, if not the, best lines in the NHL this season. The trio currently ranks first (Johnson), second (Kucherov) and sixth (Palat) in plus/minus and first (Johnson), third (Kucherov) and 17th (Palat) in even-strength scoring.

And this year should be another good one for Lightning Young Guns. In addition to Vasilevskiy, Series II will definitely include a Young Card of Jonathan Drouin, the third overall pick of the 2013 draft.