[SuperMatt18]

His struggles being all year are a bit overstated too IMO.

He struggled for sure the first 4 games where he came back from injury, which was to be expected.

Then in November he actually had a pretty strong month, but was just a bit snakebit in terms of his on ice shooting percentage.

He was 5th on the team in xGF in November (50.6%), led the team with 5 goals, led the team with 51 shots, but had a team low 5.0% on-ice shooting percentage. So he was actually generating a lot in November (3.4 shots per game is a crazy pace, like 278 over 82 games is top 20 in the NHL), but had very bad on-ice luck that deflated his point totals. His own shooting being 10% wasn't terrible though.

Then the struggles really started in December, where he stopped generating shots, and the bad luck kept up too.

He only has 15 shots in the last 15 games in December and January, which is a huge drop from the 51 he had in the 15 games in November. He actually had strong underlying stats 53.15% but TBH looked lost on that line with Backlund a bit, and him and Coronato were just not a fit together at all.

So some of the struggles were actually the coaches trying to figure things out too I think. The Sharangovich-Backlund-Coronato line wasn't really a fit for him, the line had great possession (55.4%) but only scored 2 goals on 74 shots (2.70%) and he looked really lost in that time where he deferred to Backlund and Coronato a lot.

It's unfortunate that Zary got hurt because the Pelletier-Zary-Sharangovich line actually has shown a lot of promise with a 66.1% xGF, and 7% on ice shooting so far but he still wasn't shooting enough which has been the issue over the last 15 games.

Last game he was generating more and getting his shot off with a bit more, so hopefully that can continue.