Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
Except that players do plateau. Players need to continually be challenged throughout their development. When they are no longer challenged they have potential to plateau and no longer develop. There's an old adage to development in baseball. You don't learn to hit major league fast balls by hitting off minor league pitchers. You don't learn to play at the speed and pace of the NHL game by playing against minor league players. Coaches can't teach you speed and can't teach you to do things at speed. That only comes with experience.
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Yes! I totally agree with this and sticking with the baseball analogy you see more young players rapidly rising through mlb team's minor league ranks. You need to stretch players continually and they will make significant improvement this way.
I take this argument to be the basis of bringing Jankowski up as I think goalies need to face shots.
In Monahan's rookie year there was talk (especially amongst the analytics crowd) that Monahan was not ready and his underlying numbers were showing that. However, these were just hard lessons he needed to learn at then NHL level in order to improve from. Monahan did find success and scored over 20 goals. Monahan was an extremely fast learner and you've seen his subsequent rise year after year. I just think the growth players get when challenged early in their careers leads to higher ceilings in the long run.
You can't just bring up players and have them fail constantly and lose confidence however. The AHL is good for rounding out players overall games and certain details they need.
There's no way to prove one is better than other but I strongly believe in the aggressive promotion of young players if they've shown they can handle it.