Quote:
Originally Posted by FanIn80
He didn't say he's not a top center, he said he's not an NHL center.
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Sean Monahan doesn't have the versatility in his game to be an effective play-driving NHL centre right now. He is a pure shooter who is extraordinarily good at what he does. But his overall game is sorely lacking and his transitional play is basically non-existent.
I think they need to shelter him on the wing and, potentially, search for a trade partner. Where do you play him if he's not with Gaudreau? His game impacts plummet dramatically whenever he's slotted anywhere else. To his credit, he has good synergy with Gaudreau but it's also very concerning how teams feast on the Flames whenever Monahan is by himself — and how the Flames instantly become significantly more likely to score whenever Gaudreau plays with a different centre.
In the 253 minutes Monahan has played at 5v5 without Gaudreau since the start of 2018-19, the Flames have been outscored
20 to 6. When Johnny has played without Monahan, the Flames have outscored their opponents 19 to 16.
When Monahan has played without Gaudreau, the Flames have generated a meagre 43.68% of the expected goals. When Gaudreau plays with Monahan, the Flames generate 51.56% of them. When Gaudreau is moved away from Monahan, that figure rises to 56.13%. (These figures are all from Natural Stat Trick).
Monahan's transitional game barely exists. In 2019-20, he averaged just 6.04 individual controlled zone entries per 60 minutes, the second-worst mark of any Flames forward, the worst of any centre, and near the bottom of the league. During his zone entries, Monahan only carried the puck into the offensive zone 42% of the time, the second-worst mark on the Flames. He averaged the fourth-fewest shot assists (passes that led to shots) from the neutral or defensive zones of any Flames forward, only ahead of Bennett, Rieder, and Dube. He is not the catalyst for up-tempo transitional play that leads to offense.
Monahan does not consistently forecheck and he infrequently makes effective passes. In 2019-20, he ranked solidly below-average in Corey Sznajder's publicly accessible forecheck puck recovery and goal-line pass data. Monahan also ranks second-worst on the Flames—and far below the league average—for low-to-high passes (finding his defensemen with passes to the point). Players like Bennett, Dube, Tkachuk, and Lucic thrive at retrieving the puck. Gaudreau is among the league's elite at finding players with dangerous passes in the offensive zone. Monahan fulfils neither of these expectations on a consistent basis.
Monahan is very talented at finding open space and being the beneficiary of great passes enabled by effective puck retrieval. But he seldom starts plays in transition, he does not retrieve pucks, he does little to enable shots by other players, and (this year) he has not scored very often at even strength.
I try hard to like Sean Monahan and he has had good seasons in the past, but this year and last have been extremely difficult for him and I think a switch to the wing is necessary to take some of these burdens off him. I've even said as recently as this past off-season that Monahan is underrated by some and I still think it's true to an extent—he still absolutely has the pure talent to be a consistent 30-goal scorer in this league if he's utilized properly, and I definitely think he's a top-six producer. But he is not performing effectively right now. And I've recently come to the conclusion that I think he would be far better suited on the wing.