High Noon 2024: Ranking the NHL’s 50 best forwards today
In the upcoming weeks, every major outlet will count down the NHL’s best players. Most will be subjective, driven by a hotly debated vote from a panel of staffers or insiders.
With just 51 days until the puck drops on the 2024-25 season, we’re cutting the line.
When I launched Adjusted Hockey two years ago — initially a Hockey Hall of Fame project — one of the goals was to rank every player by position at the end of every season. The idea was to deliver the hockey equivalent of the Official World Golf Rankings. A living timeline of the world’s best players.
Enter the High Noon rankings.
Using adjusted point shares as a proxy for value, we could rate individuals in an equitable way, eliminating reputation and minimizing bias. An example: How good was Phil Kessel at his best?… the #13 forward in the NHL. While an impressive feat, many would not consider it a Hall of Fame-worthy peak. High Noon was designed to help understand a player’s true place in the league’s hierarchy.
But the use of High Noon extends beyond the niche lens of the HHOF. It’s a valuable tool to capture both hockey’s past and the current moment — which is what we’re most interested in today.
🕛 Intro to High Noon
Before we get to the rankings, here’s a brief introduction. You can read about High Noon’s mechanics in this original post. In short, it uses a weighted three-year average: 2023-24 represents 50% of a player’s score; 2022-23 gets one-third (33%); 2021-22 gets one-sixth (17%). The split helps take a longer-range view of performance — a brilliant few months on a stacked power play doesn’t make a player one of the game’s best. So, eligibility begins after three seasons (i.e., Connor Bedard will debut in 2026).
- Players are divided positionally: forwards, defensemen, goaltenders.
- By leveraging point shares, the High Noon system is driven by boxscore stats — not advanced data.
- Goals are more valuable than assists, having a more direct impact on scoring overall.
- Players are broadly assigned credit for team defense based on ice time and team-relative plus-minus.
- Goaltenders with high save percentages and shot counts are rewarded most.
- Playoffs aren’t factored in — post-season opportunities and opposition being too arbitrary to include.
- Missing time isn’t punished, so long as the games played threshold over the three-year window is met.
Like any method, the High Noon approach has limits. But it delivers results systematically, offering a middle ground between the superficial trappings of the NHL scoring race and nuanced analytics.
Part one of our three-part series: the 50 best forwards in the NHL today…
👑 The Top 50
How to Read these Rankings: Artemi Panarin’s score in the High Noon system is 10.8, making him the #8 forward in the NHL right now. In 2022, he was ranked #7; in 2023, he dropped to #14. The Change column is his increase of +6 spots from #14 to #8 in the last year. Panarin’s peak — his High Noon — is #5, which is the highest spot he’s ever been ranked (2021).
1️⃣ Who’s #1?
No surprise here. Connor McDavid remains the NHL’s #1 forward. But the gap has shrunk. A year ago, McDavid (15.2) led runner-up Leon Draisaitl (13.0) by 2.2. This year? Nathan MacKinnon’s explosive MVP season launched him to 13.6 — just 0.9 behind McDavid’s 14.5. Despite a 100-assist season, the Oiler captain’s score dropped, largely from his goal count slicing in half (64 to 32). For those expecting scoring champion Nikita Kucherov (#4) to have been McDavid’s biggest threat, it’s a reminder that the rankings incorporate a defensive component and are not a one-season exercise.
That’s five straight years in a row at the top for McDavid — a historically significant run. Among post-expansion forwards, the overall leaders in #1 finishes: Mario Lemieux (10); Wayne Gretzky (7); Phil Esposito (7); Sidney Crosby (6); Guy Lafleur (5). Only Gretzky and Esposito (seven each) have ever had six consecutive years at #1. McDavid will need to fend off the game’s best another year to join the exclusive club.
📈 Trending Up
- Biggest Jumps Inside the Top 100:
- Gabriel Vilardi (+71, from #152 to #81)
- William Karlsson (+57, from #142 to #85)
- Sam Reinhart (+47, from #66 to #19)
- Robert Thomas (+42, from #91 to #49)
- Brock Boeser (+41, from #111 to #70)
📉 Trending Down
- Exiting the Top 50:
- Johnny Gaudreau (from #27 to #86)
- Jonathan Huberdeau (from #36 to #115!)
- Elias Lindholm (from #38 to #102)
- Mark Stone (from #39 to #56)
- John Tavares (from #40 to #54)
- Ryan Nugent-Hopkins (from #44 to #55)
- Nikolaj Ehlers (from #42 to #62)
- Alex Tuch (from #46 to #52)
💥 Feature Player
That makes a perfect 17-for-17 among the league’s top 20 forwards for Sidney Crosby in High Noon. Most public rankings will place him higher on reputation or intangibles than his current #14 slot. But a statistical approach regards his last half-decade more as a franchise player than among the top handful of forwards in the NHL. With Alex Ovechkin finally slipping to #34, Crosby is now the outright leader in top-20 seasons among forwards since expansion: Crosby (17); Ovechkin (16); Joe Sakic (15).
🎯 Quick Hits
- How about Kirill Kaprizov (#7)? Perhaps the most underappreciated offensive weapon in the NHL.
- Yes, that’s how incredible Jason Robertson (#12)’s year was in 2022-23 (46 goals, 109 points).
- If we gave Connor Bedard credit for three seasons like his rookie year, he’d have debuted at #94.
- Top team representation: 2024 Cup champion Florida is the only team with four top-50 forwards: Matthew Tkachuk (#10); Aleksander Barkov (#18); Sam Reinhart (#19); Carter Verhaeghe (#31)
- Edmonton, Toronto, and Tampa Bay are the only other franchises with three forwards in the top 25.
- Notable top-50 omissions: Tim Stutzle (#60), Brock Boeser (#70), Mat Barzal (#72), and Nick Suzuki (#88) — all great candidates to slide up in 2025.
- Former #1 forwards Evgeni Malkin (#59) and Patrick Kane (#61) were just shy of the top 50.
Any big surprises? Players too high? Too low? Excluded entirely? Let us know!
Stay tuned next week for Part Two (Defensemen) and Part Three (Goaltenders)…
Follow @AdjustedHockey on X; Data from Hockey-Reference.com