Hockey Superstars 2019-2020

Despite the fact that the review copy of Paul Romanuk's annual Hockey Superstars offering arrived very late this year, another NHL season did begin without its being on my shelf. With the 2019-2020 edition, Romanuk, a sports broadcaster and author, has maintained the annual's familiar "sandwich" format. Once more, the "meat" portion consists of 16 pairs of glossy pages, with the rectos resembling oversized hockey cards bearing an action, full-colour photo of one of the volume's superstars. Again, the volume’s entries are alphabetically ordered, beginning with the San Jose Sharks’ bearded defenseman Brent Burns and concluding with the Winnipeg Jets’ center Mark Scheifele. Romanuk continues to feature a seventeenth star on the book's cover, with this year’s cover highlighting Johnny Gaudreau, a left winger for the Calgary Flames. The two-column text for the other NHL stars, which appears on the page facing the player's photo, usually speaks to happenings related to the player's previous NHL season and includes a quote by or about the player being highlighted and bolded. The bolded section for the Boston Bruins’s right winger David Pastrnak reads:

You have to be good on defense too. If you want to be a good hockey player you have to play for the team, and you don’t play for the team just by scoring.

"Did You Know?" and "Hockey Memories" can be found at the bottom of the text page, with both providing brief snippets of information about the page's focal player. For example, the "Did You Know?" about the Montreal Canadien’s center Max Domi informs readers that "Max was diagnosed with Type I diabetes when he was 12. One of the first things he asked was ‘Can I still play hockey?’ When the answer was ‘yes,’ his mindset became ‘we’ll take care of everything in stride and just find a way to do it.’” What players contribute to the brief "Hockey Memories" varies widely. The Tampa Bay Lightening’ right winger Nikita Kucherov shares that “[he] got into hockey when he was a young boy and his family moved to Moscow. ‘It was an accident. My mother went to look for a job and we were passing a hockey rink and she went in and got work and then decided to bring me along to work, to play hockey.’” On the action photo page, Romanuk provides the player's stats for the previous season as well as his draft ranking and first NHL team, date and place of birth, position, height and weight (Metric and Imperial units) plus shooting/catching handedness.

Of the NHL's now 31 teams, 13 are represented in this edition of Hockey Superstars, with four teams, the Calgary Flames, San Jose Sharks, Tampa Bay Lightning and the Toronto Maple Leafs each having a pair of entries. Like last year's edition, players who are wingers and centers dominate, constituting 11 of the entries with the remainder being equally divided between goalies and defensemen. The book's superstars are a mixture of established veterans and relative newcomers, with players like the Sharks’ Brent Burns, the Penguins’ Sidney Crosby and the Predators’ Pekka Rinne falling into the former category, and players such as the Bruins’ David Pastrnak, the Canucks’ Elias Pettersson and the Leafs' Mitch Marner representing the latter. As always, there are holdovers from the previous year's edition who have continued to shine, including the Flames' Johnny Gaudreau and the Capitals' Alex Ovechkin.

The book's sandwich "bread" is again made up of two sections of matte pages which principally provide brief, point form information about the NHL teams, end of season stats, NHL awards, and 18 referee signals, or the pages offer the book's readers opportunities to record information as the season proceeds or to make predictions about individual players or team outcomes. A new addition that is located on the book's last page is "Future Stars?" which lists the top four picks from the 2019 NHL Entry Draft: Jack, Hughes, Kaapo Kakko, Kirby Dach and Bowen Byram. Only three of the four players are identified by a colour photo, but each gets a brief, point form. That for Jack Hughes reads:

Jack Hughes

Center
1.75 m (5'10") / 77.5 kg (171 lbs.)
Born: May 14, 2001, in Orlando, Florida
Drafted: 1st by the New Jersey Devils
2018-2019 Club: U.S. National Team
Development Program

The reader participation "bread" portions reinforce that Hockey Superstars 2019-2020 is more likely an individual "home" purchase, but copies in public and school libraries will also definitely circulate well.