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Originally Posted by GranteedEV
Please stop hyperbolizing what I said.
He's shown that confident play for periods every season.
And yes, starting your season flanked by Lucic and Norstrom is a confidence killer, that line was buried in the defensive zone and then the coach who said "Sam Bennett is a center" changed his mind and put Sam Bennett on the wing only ONE period later. You can defend all these no name head coaches who have come and gone all you want, and you can defend our rookie head coach too. End of the day, the team results will be the same, and the player results will be the same. The only coach with guts that we've had was the one Treliving inherited from the previous regime.
Nor has that line improved with the removal of Bennett. It's still a disaster with "super high IQ vet center Derek Ryan" centering it.
I want him to be more consistently confident. But some players respond poorly to being chucked around the lineup, chucked around special teams etc.
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Are there other players in the NHL who have a similar level of psychological fragility?
The reason I don't buy this line of argument is because this exact same thing happens to dozens of young players on every NHL team every single season, and yet there are lots of them who manage to do precisely what Bennett has never done: work their way up from possession black-holes to secure better spots in the lineup. There are also plenty who never get there, and that's fine. I am comfortable with the fact that Bennett will never get there, because he lacks the skills to do so.
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I know all your rebuttals so don't bother. I'm exhausted of talking about Bennett with you to be honest. It's as if you think it's in the team's best interest for the player to fail. Good for you, but I disagree. End of story.
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Now that is just patently unfair. Yeah, there are certainly some posters like New Era who seem pretty pleased with themselves about the fact that Bennett has not panned out to be anything more than a bottom six grinding forward. But I think the vast majority of us who remain unconvinced that he is just hard done by because of line deployment and coaching decisions—that he somehow is what he is after five years—are also not happy about it. Some of us are actually just tired of seeing others constantly blamed for Bennett's ever-present shortcomings. At what point can we all just admit that he is not a top-six talent who has been destroyed by bad coaching?