Quinn Hughes is now an Amazon star. He’s one of the players most heavily featured in the Faceoff: Inside the NHL docuseries that just dropped on Prime this week, and the reviews say that we see a brand-new side of the Canucks captain’s off-ice personality.
On the ice, however, the term “star” really doesn’t cut it for Hughes anymore. Even “superstar” might be putting it a tad lightly these days.
Maybe “megastar.” “Elite talent.” “Top tier.”
Really, any superlative short of “generational” probably applies to Hughes at this point in time. And if the pre-season lists and rankings of various publications are any indication, one term we can definitely apply to Hughes as of 2024/25 is “top-ten NHL player.”
Sportsnet recently published its annual list of the top-50 players in the NHL, and for the first time, Hughes cracked the uppermost echelon. Their list had him ranked at #8 overall, nestled right in between Sidney Crosby at #9 and David Pastrnak at #7.
According to Sportsnet, Hughes is the second-best defender in the world, trailing just Cale Makar, who they had ranked at #3 overall.
Coming off a Norris Trophy win this past year, such rankings are unprecedented territory for Hughes, and nearly unprecedented for this franchise, as we’ll get to in a bit. Unprecedented, perhaps, but also universal.
It’s not just Sportsnet who has Hughes ranked in their top-ten.
Over at TSN, Hughes was also ranked at #8 overall heading into the 2024/25 campaign, though this time it was between Artemi Panarin at #9 and Pastrnak, again, at #7. On TSN’s list, however, Hughes only ranked two spots behind Makar at #6.
The team at The Hockey Writers went big with a list of the top-100 NHL players for 2024/25, featuring four Canucks in Hughes, Elias Pettersson, JT Miller, and Brock Boeser (with Thatcher Demko left off the list due to injury concerns.) And they also went big on Hughes himself, ranking him slightly higher than Sportsnet and TSN at #7 overall. This time, Hughes is one spot ahead of Pastrnak at #8, and one spot behind Leon Draisaitl at #6.
The company just keeps getting more impressive.
The NHL itself hasn’t finished publishing their own top-50 list, preferring to parcel it out ten players at a time. But as of this writing, they’d covered 50-11, and Hughes had yet to make an appearance, so either they’ve got him ranked in their top-ten, too, or they’ve got him at #51. We’re pretty sure we know which one it is.
The Hockey News was a bit low on Hughes in their annual yearbook, but only by the ridiculously high standard set by the other lists. They had Hughes at #9 overall, one ahead of Panarin at #10 and one behind – you guessed it – Pastrnak at #8.
Heck, the only published list we could find that didn’t list Hughes in their top-ten came from DirecTV, a company not normally associated with hockey coverage. They placed Hughes at #11 overall, right behind Crosby at #10 but ahead of Draisaitl at #12. It’s a bit of a weird list.
The folks over at The Athletic have the most difficult list to interpret, because they split players into tiers, and then list them alphabetically within said tiers.
Under their top tier of “MVP,” The Athletic has three players listed in their “1A” sub-tier, being Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, and Auston Matthews. In the “1B” sub-tier, they’ve got four more players in Aleksander Barkov, Nikita Kucherov, Draisaitl, and Makar.
And then in “1C,” they’ve got five more players listed; again, in alphabetical order. Those players are Hughes, his brother Jack, Adam Fox, Matthew Tkachuk, and Pastrnak.
That’s a top-12, and there’s no way to know where exactly Hughes ranks within that #8 to #12 range. Either way, it still amounts to a rating of “best of the best.”
As we mentioned earlier, having a player ranked so highly overall is not entirely unprecedented territory for the Vancouver Canucks, but it is definitely a rare occurrence.
We can’t exactly find any concrete proof, but we have to imagine that Pavel Bure was ranked somewhere in the league’s top-ten circa the 1992/93 and 1993/94 seasons, though there was also considerable competition there.
Even the Sedin twins, and even at their very best, struggled to crack the top ten. Henrik Sedin was ranked there by most publications heading into 2010/11 and coming off the Hart and Art Ross in 2009/10. But then, most publications left Daniel outside of their top-tens.
That year, of course, it was Daniel’s turn with the Art Ross, and so heading into 2011/12 it was Daniel’s turn in the top-ten…and Henrik’s turn on the outside looking in. The Hockey News yearbook for that season had Daniel at #9 overall – which seems a little low for a guy who just led the league in scoring – and Henrik at #11, with Zdeno Chara sandwiched in between them at #10.
All of which goes to say that Hughes having reached this echelon is a truly special moment, and worthy of celebration. Sure, such lists are ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things. But they are a measurement of a player’s standing on the worldwide scale of hockey, and that Hughes is now so universally recognized as belonging among the very best of the best is significant.
That he’s already there at age 24 is downright impressive, and it also means he’s got a real chance to do something that no Canuck has ever done: stay on the top-ten lists for a few years running.
