I'm not concerned about the player as much as I'm concerned about our inability to use him effectively.
He's a high-offence, run and gun kinda player... and we're very much a slow-it-down, plug up the neutral zone, get pucks deep and try to push them in the net kinda team. He likes to score goals and be creative, we like to chase the puck and score by committee.
I made this point in the off season, and it worries me that it's coming true. He doesn't fit what this organization is trying to do. I was hoping that the team would start game planning and making roster decisions based around finally having a highly-skilled, offensive defenceman... instead, it's just the same ol' same old.
We could have moved some guys out in the offseason, guaranteeing open spots for young guys to compete to fill. Spent the summer at the drawing board, reworking our systems to be more dynamic, faster and more offensive (knowing we would have younger legs coming in). We could have iced a faster, more exciting team that would have probably won just as many games as the current team has... We'd probably still be trending towards McKenna, but at least we'd be doing it as a newly revamped team that was using this season to become the kind of team that a guy like McKenna could thrive on...
That would have been fun.
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