Mark Scheifele Jersey Card

Mark Scheifele has been the Winnipeg Jets' first-line centre for five years at this point and, at 26 years old, barring a major injury, he'll be a point-per-game player for at least five more, so it's no surprise he scored his third career hat trick earlier tonight. The Ottawa Senators' Nick Paul had scored the opening goal, but Scheifele tied the game and gave the Jets the lead before the end of the first period and added the sealer with under two minutes left in the third, which was a very "Schiefele thing" to do.

It's no coincidence the Jets' alternate captain was selected in his second-straight All-Star Game earlier in the month: not only is he relatively consistent - tonight's game may have marked the end of a 12-game goal-less drought, but he had battled the flu for over a week and had gathered assists here and there - he also has a flair for the dramatic, displaying a level of clutch play that matches that of Stanley Cup-winning (former?) teammate Dustin Byfuglien and captain Blake Wheeler.

Winnipeg was always high on Schiefele, having selected him 7th overall in 2011, and if there was a do-over, he's one of the few who were selected in the top-10 who still would be, with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins (1st), Sean Couturier (8th), Jonathan Huberdeau, Dougie Hamilton (9th) and possibly Gabriel Landeskog (2nd) and Mika Zibanejad (6th), but those guys would be joined by Nikita Kucherov (58th), Johnny Gaudreau (104th), Vincent Trocheck (64th) and maybe Phillip Danault (26th) and Jean-Gabriel Pageau (96th) instead of Ryan Strome (5th), Adam Larsson (4th) and Jonas Brodin (10th). He was the top centre in a left wing-heavy (Huberdeau, Gaudreau, Landeskog) draft class.

I was extremely happy to land card #TS-MS from Upper Deck's 2015-16 Artifacts collection and Treasured Swatches sub-set, showing him wearing the Jets' white (away) uniform and featuring a dark blue swatch:

Internationally, he's suited up for Team Canada at the U-18s in 2011 (gold medal), 2012 (bronze) and 2013 (4th place) World Juniors, the 2012 Russia-Canada Series (victory), and the 2014 (5th place), 2016 (gold) and 2017 (silver) World Championships, and Team North America (5th place) at the 2016 World Cup, playing alongside Gaudreau, Couturier, Trocheck, RNH, Auston Matthews, Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Jonathan Drouin Jack Eichel, Seth Jones and then-Jets teammates Jacob Trouba and Connor Hellebuyck, among others.