It's a chicken and egg situation.
- A. Bennett didn't score a whole lot because he didn't get to play with very good linemates.
- B. Bennett didn't get to play with very good linemates because he didn't score a whole lot.
The reality is both are factors, and it's pretty clearly pushing a narrative to ignore one and attribute
Bennett's results entirely to the other.
That said, I'd like to illustrate how hard it is to put up good offensive numbers from a depth role. Not all ice time is created equally, so comparing goal/point totals straight across is rarely a fair comparison. So I'm going to look at a best-case scenario: suppose
Bennett produces exactly like Gaudreau.
Factor #1: ice time. When you play less, you'll put up fewer points. So if we take Gaudreau's scoring rates and apply them to
Bennett's ice time, here's what we get. I'm going to use Backlund instead for PK rates since Gaudreau doesn't kill penalties, and that will inflate the totals a bit to give a true "best case hypothetical":
5v5: 48 points -> 40 points
5v4: 21 points -> 8 points
5v3: 2 points -> 0 points
4v4: 2 points -> 1 point
3v3: 3 points -> 0 points
4v5: 3 points -> 1 point (Backlund)
3v5: 0 points -> 0 points (Backlund)
So this hypothetical player who scores like the best of Gaudreau and Backlund merged into one, but is deployed like a 3rd liner for some reason, finishes the season with 50 points. If we only recognized his greatness and deployed him like the true all star he is, he'd have scored 79 points instead. (Corsica is missing a few of Gaudreau's points somewhere). So just from reduced ice time, this player loses 29 points.
Factor #2: linemates. Playing with better players will get you more points for the same quality of player. Gaudreau spent about 75% of his ice time with Sean Monahan last year, and their lines scored at a rate of 3.5 GF/60. In the other 25%, Gaudreau's lines scored at a rate of 2.43 GF/60. That's with a pretty even distribution across our bottom 6 players that year:
Bennett, Jankowski, Lazar, Hathaway, Stajan, Brouwer all make appearances, as well as a bit of time with Backlund and Frolik. If we apply that to our above total of 40 5v5 points, it gets further reduced to 27 points. So there's another 13 points just due to linemates at 5v5, bringing the total down from 50 points to 37.
I think it'd be totally unreasonable to expect
Bennett to be better than Gaudreau. And yet, in order to crack 40 points, there's a strong case to be made he would have had to be. This isn't meant to totally absolve
Bennett of any blame. But I do think we need to have our expectations in check. It's really, really difficult to score like a top-6 player without top-6 minutes or significant PP time.
