Cutter Gauthier, destroyer of Worlds

It’s that time on the hockey calendar for the majority of hockey fans. Unless your team is still involved in the NHL playoffs, you’re trying to enjoy the festivities as a neutral observer, thinking about the upcoming transactions in the offseason, or watching some familiar players play hockey elsewhere for their country.

Well, lucky for us as attention-payers for the Philadelphia Flyers, there are still some interesting things happening on the ice for players of this hockey club.

Over in Finland, the IIHF World Championships are going on and while normally we would be treated to established players like Travis Sanheim, Claude Giroux, or Jakub Voracek suiting up for their country’s team, this time it’s a little more exciting. Flyers top prospect Cutter Gauthier is playing for Team U.S.A. and let’s just say that he is dominating the tournament in a whole lot of ways.

Through six games, Gauthier has scored the second-most goals in the tournament with six of his own and seven total points. But that is almost as expected since he has been absolutely rocketing shots on every helpless non-American goaltender at every chance he gets.

Gauthier leads the tournament with 38 shots on goal. Again, that’s in six games. Six. He has 38 shots in six games. A Flyers prospect is averaging 6.33 shots on goal per game in a tournament where the vast majority of players are much older than him. The player with the second-most shots on goal in the tournament? Buffalo Sabres forward Alex Tuch who scored about a point per game in the NHL this season. He has a measly 23 shots. The difference between Gauthier and Tuch (15 shots) is the same difference between Tuch at No. 2 and and the skater with that ranks 46th in shots. Forty-sixth!

The 19-year-old 2022 fifth-overall pick is destroying the competition when it comes to scoring goals.

In comparison, here is a list of players that have managed to equal or exceed Gauthier’s 38 shots on goal in a World Championship tournament in the last five years:

• Kaapo Kakko (2019, 10 GP, 40 shots)
• Patrick Kane (2018, 10 GP, 44 shots)
• Cam Atkinson (2018, 10 GP, 41 shots)
• Ryan Nugent-Hopkins (2018, 10 GP, 38 shots)

Note: I wanted to do a larger range of tournaments but the IIHF seems to have cleared all shot data from every tournament past 2018. But, you get the jist of what I’m trying to say.

It is pretty dang clear that not many players are even able to hit the same amount of shots Gauthier is taking in this tournament. All of these players had four extra games to just slightly beat Gauither or equal. If the Flyers’ top prospect sustains his average for just one more game, he will have more shots than all of them.

Maybe it feels silly to think about shots on goal this much when he isn’t even leading the tournament in goals scored, but in order to have those shots, he needs to have made his way to open ice, or to have averted some defensive pressure. Not all 38 shots are equal, but all of them should paint a picture of a forward that is able to dominate in the offensive zone in multiple ways.

It has been an incredibly long time since we have seen a Flyers prospect to this well against some of the top competition in the hockey world. We’re trying not to overhype Gauthier as he heads into his sophomore season at Boston College, but it’s hard not to get excited at what the young forward could turn into just down the coast.

Gauthier and the rest of his American friends will have a chance to win a medal when the tournament starts its elimination games on Thursday.