I have been watching Neal for awhile when he is on the ice. He is not as bad as presented in this thread and he will succeed in conjunction with the other middle players like Bennett, Jankowski, and Frolik. If you look at Bingo's stats on the 4 lines his performance is consistent with how the third line performs in general. If Jankowski continues to break out, Neal will also break out. Sure he is overpaid, but he is a solid third liner at worst.
Other then some statistical comparisons, i don't see any comparison to Brouwer, who you could see lost the puck consistently and did not "advance" play at all. Brouwer was a borderline 4th line player(between 4th line and sitting out).
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