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Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee
Could not disagree more. Phillips needed a little more icetime and time with higher skilled players. He would have been fine in the NHL if he wasn’t playing 6 minutes a night with Lewis and Ritchie.
The difference between the farm and NHL these days has narrowed significantly. It isn’t Darryl’s NHL where there was a wider gap between the AHL and NHL. The NHL these days is driven younger with the salary cap and kids are emerging as high impact players earlier in their career. Also, they are far more motivated than floating vets on guaranteed contracts. There’s a stark difference between a person trying to work for millions of dollars and a person who already has made millions of dollars.
If Phillips had Pelletier’s opportunity I don’t think you’d see much differentiation in production or performance. Pelletier has more icetime, better line mates and more opportunity and the real difference comes down to coaches preferences.
To me, the real disappointment of Sutter this year is his abandonment of the merit system. It’s the only way to motivate players. Many on this site don’t view effort as a major issue with this current group but I think it is. So many times you’ll see many vets mail it in, and the reality is that they’ve all made their big contracts. Young guys need way more chances. Then when they stumble sit them and rotate in the vets, who have pride on the line and will be eager to prove doubters wrong. Gifting vets icetime because they “won cups” and “are champions” or some other non-understandable nonsense flies in the face of human psychology and common sense. Yeah, the kid who wants millions will work harder than the kid who has it, when the true nominal difference in their speed and skill amounts to 0.00000001%, the effort is the differentiator.
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Disagree, Pelletier got the ice time he did because he plays a different game than Phillips. Phillips had to be generating offence to be effective and he mainly got out muscled. He is too small to be an effective NHLer and I bet he won’t be a regular on the next team he signs for.