What if NHL had its own Shohei Ohtani? What would that look like?

For those not familiar, Ohtani is a baseball player who both pitches and plays in the field and hits. And he excels at both. Finding field players in baseball who can pitch and vice versa has been extremely rare in modern baseball and usually when they arise, they are forced to pick one of the other. Ohtani has successfully built his career based off of pitching in the rotation, then hitting on his off days (when other starting pitchers are resting). This year, he is leading the American League in home runs while on those “rest days”. Here are his Wins Above Replacement statistics for last few shears as a pitcher and a hitter:

PITCHING: WAR (GA -- W-L -- ERA -- WHIP -- K/9)

-- 2021: +3.0 (23 -- 9-2 -- 3.18 -- 1.09 -- 10.77)
-- 2022: +5.6 (28 -- 15-9 -- 2.33 -- 1.01 -- 11.87)
-- 2023: +2.4 (23 -- 10-5 -- 3.14 -- 1.06 -- 11.39)
-- 3-year: +10.9 (74 -- 34-16 -- 2.84 -- 1.05 -- 11.39)

-- 3y Ranks: 12th (51st -- 16th -- 6th -- 12th -- 6th)

But WAR for pitching is agnostic of fielding, so a more accurate measure may be RA/9 WAR which isolates the pitchers performance:

-- 2021: +3.9 (31st)
-- 2022: +6.2 (6th)
-- 2023: +3.8 (21st)
-- 3-year: +13.9 (7th)

HITTING: WAR (PA -- HR -- RBI -- AVG -- OBP -- SLG -- OPS)
-- 2021: +5.1 (639 -- 46 -- 100 -- .257 -- .372 -- .592 -- .965)
-- 2022: +3.8 (666 -- 34 -- 95 -- .273 -- .356 -- .519 -- .875)
-- 2023: +6.6 (539 -- 44 -- 95 -- .304 -- .412 -- .654 -- 1.066)
-- 3-year: +15.5 (1904 -- 124 -- 296 -- .277 -- .379 -- .585 -- .964)

-- 3y Ranks: 11th (19th -- 4th -- 14th -- 37th -- 9th -- 2nd -- 2nd)

Just looking a WAR as direction comparison, his ranking for pitching / hitting for each season:

-- 2021: 31st / 18th
-- 2022 6th: / 43rd
-- 2023: 21st / 5th
-- 3-year: 7th / 11th


NHL EQUIVALENT

So imagine if an NHL player played a portion of their games as a goalie and the rest as a skater? I am making the assumption that various facets of each sport would be matched up as the following…

-- Pitching = Goaltending
-- Defense = Defense
-- Hitting = Forwards

Here would be the goalies in similar rankings for WAR for pitching for each season:

Pitching equivalent (goalies):
-- 2020-21: Antti Raanta
-- 2021-22: Thatcher Demko
-- 2022-22: Sergei Bobrovsky
-- 3-year: Thatcher Demko

And here would be the forwards that would match up to hitting:

Hitting equivalent (forwards)
-- 2020-21: Aleksander Barkov
-- 2021-22: Matthew Boldy
-- 2022-23: Auston Matthews
-- 3-year: Jason Robertson

So imagine if an NHLer were good enough to play goalie like Thatcher Demko in net and score like Jason Robertson as a forward? That would be hockey’s version of Shohei Ohtani.

Basically peak sergei fedorov. Elite offensive and defensive player, could legit play as a defenceman and bowman said he'd be a norris guy if he stuck back there.
Without the goaltending bit obviously

Never played defense but was probably the best 2-way player to ever exist in Datsyuk could be a good example too

The problem with trying to compare positions to baseball is hockey is very fluent whereas baseball is extremely stop and go

I picked fedorov because he actually played defence a bit, and you could argue he was as good or bettet than datsyuk 2 ways but it would be splitting hairs (and we dont have the stats to go back and confirm)
But yeah, hockey positions are a very different thing from sports that are generally offence or defence at one time

There is no apples to apples…but imagine if a team had someone who could play goalie and as skater…would be wild.

I played in a pickup game a few years ago with a couple former pros. One of the best skaters was a recently retired NHL goalie. He could fly.

i guess bobby orr was sort of a ohtani.

What about Byfuglien?

Old name but Lester Patrick? Think he played D and G and also coached and played a game as coach? Obviously this is like 100 years ago though lol

This is no joke; I have only played against a few former pro level guys in our advanced beer league (ECHL and guys that made it to division 2 European leagues) and one of the best skaters was a former goalie. Pretty much any goalie at that level has great skating (edgework for sure), stickhandling, coordination, and typically they know how to disguise their shots from the opposing goalie (who knows best right?). Plus goalies are crazy anyway and they love to deliver hits since they aren't standing around anymore.