William Nylander probably leads the NHL in breakaways and is one of the NHL’s leading goal-scorers, so the Toronto Maple Leafs forward will be tasked with shooting the lights out for Sweden in the upcoming 4 Nations Face-Off.

Nylander is one of the assistant captains for Sweden and it appears that he’ll be a fixture on the first line, while getting key minutes on the top power play unit.

“With William Nylander I think he’s maybe the most spark we have. Many see William as an individual kind of player, offensively extremely talented and skilled,” Sweden head coach Sam Hallam said to Tracey Myers of NHL.com.

“My picture of him is he’s a really good guy and he cares a lot, and he cares a lot for the national team. Every chance he gets he wants to play for it and we want to show our appreciation and give him even more responsibility because I know he can handle it and he wants it.”

Nylander leads all Swedish skaters with 30 goals, and ranks third with 52 points behind Jesper Bratt and Lucas Raymond. Considering that Nylander is a lock on the right line, a first line featuring Bratt and Nylander, with Mika Zibanejad down the middle could be Sweden’s most likely option — a combination that was suggested by Uffe Bodin of Daily Faceoff.

Filip Forsberg has been far more productive than Zibanejad this season, with 19 goals and 51 points in 52 games, although he’s not a pure centre. Could Bratt-Forsberg-Nylander be a viable option? Or what about Bratt and Nylander together with Elias Pettersson down the middle? Pettersson is having a down year by his standards, but that could be explained by the rift with J.T. Miller, who has since been traded to the New York Rangers.

We’d be in favour of seeing Bratt-Pettersson-Nylander, which should portend the best results for Sweden, a combination of speed, scoring touch, playmaking and Pettersson’s defensive responsibility should bode well against best-on-best competition. Pettersson is by far the best defensive player of all the candidates mentioned, which should go a long way against Auston Matthews, Connor McDavid and Aleksander Barkov throughout the event.

Nylander has some experience playing with Adrian Kempe from the 2015 World Juniors, but we’re not going to ready too much into a sample from a decade ago, especially when considering the best-on-best nature of the 4 Nations. There are a lot of different combinations for Hallam and his staff to experiment with this month, and if Nylander catches fire, he could potentially propel Sweden to an upstart gold.