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Originally Posted by GullFoss
That's reasonable.
Here's how Im thinking about it. Huby is unarguably a talented player right? He put up 115 pts and was seemingly the star of that line last year. And it wasn't a fluke season because he's had years ppg production under many different coaches. He's clearly a star. How does that guy put up 55 points?
We can all agree he played the system - he didn't go rogue. But he was super ineffective. No other player has seen his point production drop that much under any coach, let alone Sutter. It's a complete outlier.
There's a difference between playing the system and committing to be the best you can be within the system. Committing to struggle up the learning curve of a new system. It's hard to imagine he really did his best to adapt and buy-in. A player with that kind of talent will find some type of success in any system. In Sutter's system, maybe success is only putting up 80 points instead of 115. We saw that reduced output with Kopitar and Iginla. It's wasn't a reduction to 55 points though
So did Huby quit on the team? I wouldn't say that. Quitting on the team would be 40 points in the first half and 15 points in the second half. That didn't happen.
But it sure looks like he gave up on trying to find success within the system for a large swath of the season. We saw him really try to find success in system in the fall of 2022. And we saw him really try to find success within the system starting again in March of 2023. But for a large swatch of season, he showed zero improvement in his ability to generate offense within the system. Instead of continuing to try and increase his success within the system, it seemed very much like "this is the output I can generate with this system." And he just dug in.
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I think confidence was a big factor and then not meshing with Lindholm; "Coming in he was really excited play with Elias" and then being asked to play on the other wing furthered his production decline.
You have Sutter still reeling from the playoff loss thinking the Flames got away from the system "which he and Tre both mentioned" So team starts playing poorly, Sutter is grumpy and any trust Huberdeau has with the coach gets eroded. I think Sutter's goal from the beginning was to have the team playing a safe defensive structure, but lack of scoring, poor goaltending added to the problems.
As for Huberdeau I don't think it was a lack of trying, I think it was a lot of factors. I don't think Sutter connected well with the room earlier in he season. He should have given Huberdeau the reins on the top line and eased him into a defensive structure. Maybe Sutter was not happy losing 2 star players, but he did a lot of odd and uncharacteristic things .