Quote:
Originally Posted by Flash Walken
That's the part I don't like. The benching is whatever, it's that he doesn't seem to get minutes even when he's dressed. Hopefully that changes after a couple of trades, but as we're seeing right now with holes in the top 6, he still can't seem to get back into the lineup.
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It's one of those catch 22 situations. With prospects, it seems the common approach is to either make him earn his minutes or play the hell out of him like a trial by fire. Personally, I think the best approach is to feed a young player steady minutes and reward him with more minutes when he's doing well. And if he manages to string some good games together you steadily increase his minutes. The worse approach IMO is a yoyo approach where a prospect is never given a chance to gain confidence where his minutes and opportunities are all over the place from game to game and in the game itself.
With that said, except for the purposes of a wakeup call, I don't agree with the idea of scratching a player but give him big minutes when he plays. With dressing the best lineup for whatever night's game in mind, how often does it make sense to scratch a top 4 defenseman or 18+ minute forward rather than giving them fewer minutes? Coaches do it all the time of course.
So ya, I don't mind Hartley's approach to developing Sven one bit. If Sven is deemed not good enough to be in the lineup, he shouldn't be given 1st line minutes or 1st unit PP time when he draws back into the lineup. I'm not saying you keep playing him with pluggers and never giving him some chances to play with better offensive players, but Hartley isn't in the wrong if he's not gifting Sven minutes especially since Sven hasn't done much to deserve more minutes.