For most of NHL history, if you wanted to find the most talented players in the world you would look towards the centre position. The extra responsibilities of a centre, like it's creating offence from the middle of the ice or doing the difficult work defensively, tend to attract players with a broad and well-rounded range of talents who can take over games. 

This current era of the NHL is no different, as a new generation of players possesses skills that can rival the all-time greats. 

Continuing our series on the game's top stars, I'll be breaking down the top 20 centres in hockey, using a variety of advanced metrics from TopDownHockey, InStat, and All Three Zones to paint as full a picture as possible. For the sake of clarity, instead of doing a 1 to 20 ranking, I've separated these guys