Jamie Benn Jersey Card

Congratulations go out to Jamie Benn for scoring his first career NHL hat trick tonight:

.@jamiebenn14's first NHL hat trick is the first by a @DallasStars player other than Tyler Seguin since Mar. 31, 2010 (Steve Ott). #DALvsSTL
— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) February 18, 2015

He is already at 22 goals on the year, which equals his totals from the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons, and he's on pace to come close to his career mark of 34, set last season, which also marks his highest season for points with 79 (he's on pace for 65 or so this year). He made the NHL's First All-Star Team last year as well.

As the Dallas Stars' captain, he's under a certain scrutiny when it comes to his actions, both on and off the ice; sometimes it helps, such as when he made Team Canada for the Sochi Olympics as a consistent-if-not-flashy contributor, but on a roster which initially didn't include two-time Art Ross winner Martin St. Louis, no one would have been surprised if a guy who had never hit the 30-goal mark before had been left out. Most Canadians were happy that he did, though, because one of his two goals in Canada's six games was the semi-finals game winner against Team USA. He also has a gold medal from the 2009 World Juniors.

Last week, he came under fire for participating in a morning radio show which involved some criticism and insults directed at the Vancouver Canucks' Henrik and Daniel Sedin; he was mature enough to apologize quickly, though he was only responsible for one sentence directed at them (''who knows what else they do together'').

It quickly became a non-story, and that's perfectly acceptable, seeing as The Twins took it in stride.

In terms of talent, I'd say he's a slower Rick Nash. Like Nash, he has terrific hands and deking moves, and might even be more accurate than the New York Rangers superstar, considering Benn won an NHL All-Star accuracy competition, hitting four targets in just over 10 seconds. We'll see ten years from now how many 30-, 40- and 50-goal seasons each will have had, but I suspect Benn could top out around 45 once, 40 another time, and surpass 30 another three or four times.

I was hesitating as to which card to feature, seeing as I have a few of his, including two with the Stars' current uniform, but I decided to show my love for Upper Deck's 2011-12 Artifacts design one more time and went with the Stars' football-inspired uniform from a few years back (which I'm glad they no longer use):

It's the two-swatch version of card #74, numbered 98/125, and though it shows him in the black (home) uniform, the pieces of game-used jersey are white. All the writing on the card is actually in silver foil, which looks much better in person than on the card.