Quote:
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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He definitely didn’t quit. He got a lot better the last 25-30 games. He needs a trigger man smart enough to play with him. The flames forward group is full of clubs.