Old and Busted Meet The New Hotness

Dustin Brown is a power forward right?  He hits hard, plays in the dirty areas of the ice and scores a lot of goals. Exactly what we want on this team.  Well I have good news for you, we have Nikolai Kulemin!

Read on if you want to see a comparison of their (young) careers thus far!

First off their individual stats:

Now a direct comparison at the same age:

But Brown joined the NHL at a much younger age.  So we'll also compare their careers by years in the NHL.  I will not include Brown's 31 game season at 19 years old as his rookie season, but instead use his 79 GP season at 21:

A couple things I notice:

1. By age it looks like Brown had a much better season at age 23.  BUT it is both his best year to date AND if we compare it to Kulemin by NHL season their 3rd seasons are VERY similar.
2. Kulemin really is developing as we should hope into a legitimate NHL power forward.
3. While Kulemin's shooting percentage is clearly much higher this year than his career average (and probably won't be sustainable), his comparison to Brown is consistent year to year.  So even if he pulls a 30 goal season this year at his abnormally high shooting percentage it is reasonable that he'll still be a mid 20 goal scorer.
4. If they recorded hits on TSN before this year I would have included them.  But Brown is DESTROYING Kulemin in this regard (203 vs 72).
5. Kulemin's plus/minus is MUCH better.  He truly has been playing very well defensively thus far in his career [Author's correction based on Chemmy pointing out I am a hypocrite]
6. One piece of math I didn't include.  Kulemin's shots per game is up to 2.31 (189 shots).  If he falls to his career SH% of 12.97%, then he would score 24.51 goals.

Keep on drinking the Kule-aid!