Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
I disagree with this. Johnny plays a much bigger playmaking role than most wingers. He's capable of driving a first line. The team can contend with him and Monahan as our top line players.
The problem with the Flames was special teams and depth scoring. Frolik and Backlund had off years. Versteeg was injured. And the rest of the bottom six were horrible. The only bright spot in the bottom six was Bennett and jankowski figuring it out, but they didn't do it soon enough or consistently enough.
Teams like Nashville, Boston, and Vegas, who are killing it in the playoffs, just have much better scoring from their depth than we did. Even TB only has only two ppg guys.
With Brouwer, Frolik, Versteeg, and Bennett all scoring 40+ points the results from this team are drastically different.
Throw in the demise is Brodie and Smith's and Monahan's injuries and it's painfully obvious what happened this season.
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The problem with the team is a lack of a good second scoring line, and a lot of that has to do with the failures of Bennett. That would fix the scoring depth. If he had been as advertised we’d have two great scoring pairs in Gaudreau/Monahan and Tkachuk/Bennett. Add what ever RW in there, Wouldn’t need to be great ones with those pairs, Ferland is good enough for one line and maybe you would have made a trade for another.. If we had that good second scoring line then Backlund/Frolik go down as your third scoring line, elite checking line. That would be a contending forward group. When did Bennett and Janko ‘figure it out’? They didn’t. Bennett was bad all year except for one month. Janko has glimpses but still has a ways to go. Bennett not living up to his draft position, at least so far, is the biggest reason this team hasn’t taken the next step. I think the coaches bear a lot of that blame, at least I hope so otherwise this is a very hard problem to solve.