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Originally Posted by Bingo
I'm of similar mind.
The guy has been unlucky for sure, so that's some of it, but to expect him to just bounce back to 12.5% shooting percentage and score 20 may be a reach in the next four years as well.
Five on five he's down in individual scoring chances per 60 which is to suggest he isn't getting in the right spots to shoot as often for sure. His high danger chance rates are less changed though, at least compared to his last Nashville year.
But where he really suffers in chance generation is the powerplay compared to his previous stops ... and that's due to a brutal second unit and not playing at all on the top unit.
Plus ... you can't discount what some powerplay success may have done to his five on five confidence.
He was second unit in Vegas but still got it done, he was largely first unit in Nashville.
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I think a lot of the current analysis even seems out of date at this stage though.
7 points in his last 14 games is right around where we should have expected him to produce. Take it a step further back to life after the Christmas break, and he has 7 points in 15 games - again, not far off what we should be expecting from him. Even his work on PP2 has greatly improved, which does line up with when Backlund and Hanifin came off PP2 and Brodie and Andersson came on (and they switched primary carrier from Backlund/Ryan to Bennett/Ryan).
The horrific start to the season was troublesome for sure, but if you also look at Ryan he wasn’t terribly effective until the beginning of December or so. It takes time to adjust for sure, and yeah Neal suffered at the start but I think the player we’ve seen for the last 5 weeks has been pretty solid.
I feel like there’s more reason for optimism today than any other time this year.