No. While his underlying numbers are there, the pure offense isnt. Makar is on pace to smash the best offensive season weve seen in 40 years, on pace for 132 points (4th best of all time behind Orr (2x) and Coffey, had a 13 game point streak to start the season and he/MacKinnon are carrying an insanely injured Avs team. His +/- is skewed because of awful goaltending and is steadily on the rise back to positive.
I am one who will finally admit Hughes has turned into a complete defenseman after last season, but this is not the season to challenge Makar for anything defensively with the numbers he is putting up.
Assuming Makar's pace falls off and then maybe you can steal the Norris from him, but still the Hart is MacKinnon's to lose right now. Once any of Drouin, Nichushkin, and Landeskog come back the Avs numbers will only rise.
As he pots a huge shorthanded goal the next night to take down an extremely hot Canes team. Makar plays all positions and doesnt get only sheltered O zone starts like Hughes does with either of Pettersson/Miller. Makar gets tossed out there to start in the D zone with the 4th line.
This was all used as arguments against Hughes' for a Hart/Norris last season, that he was offence only while Makar was better defensively (he wasn't) so it's extremely funny that Hughes 120+pt pace is proof that he's Karlsson while Makar's is proof that he's generational, despite Hughes actually being much better defensively over the past 2 seasons. Wild that his lack of offense is now a knock against him.
But again, Makar doesn't really matter in this because Hughes wouldn't be competing with him, he'd be competing with MacKinnon.
Per our old pal NatStat at 5v5:
Hughes:
CF:
63.82%
FF:
62.87%
SF: 63.1%
GF:
69.57%
xG:
65.85%
SCF: 66.38%
HDCF: 64%
HDGF:
76.92%
OZ1F:
63.16%
MacKinnon:
CF: 61.73%
FF: 62.32%
SF:
63.49%
GF: 63.79%
xG: 65.53%
SCF:
68.13%
HDCF:
68.57%
HDGF: 55%
OZF: 72.94%
I went and highlighted the better number, looks like Hughes and MacKinnon are actually pretty close statistically when you consider the raw numbers, but Natural Stat Trick doesn't track Relative numbers, so here they are from HockeyReference:
Hughes:
CFRel: +20.1%
FFRel: +21%
MacKinnon:
CFRel: +2%
FFRel: +4%
Interesting that despite all of the Avalanche's struggles, MacKinnon's possession metrics aren't that much better relative to the rest of the team, you'd think that with the Avs being bad and seriously injured, that wouldn't be the case, but he's still having a hard time. Hughes on the other hand is probably the best possession player in the league.
and as per PuckIQ, Hughes is doing better against a higher quality of competition than MacKinnon is, relative to his team, a stat that should only help MacKinnon because of how badly injured their forwards are: