Almost all Cup-winning teams in the modern game have a top-notch 2-way C in their top six.
Barkov
Point
Bergeron
Toews
O’Reilly
Kopitar
The Pens are an exception, but you can get away with that if your top 2 centres are Crosby and Malkin.
Opposing coaches would be licking their chops at the matchup opportunities of the Flames top two lines centred by Monahan and Bennett.
Crosby was an excellent 2-way centre. He often got Selke votes, finishing as high as 4th. He certainly wasn’t like Bergeron etc., but he more than held his own.
This is a lot of what I was saying. Janko-Bennett-Neal made sense on paper. Your two future stars and a vet scorer. But Janko wasn't that good and Neal sucked ass.
Back then Bennett didn't look like a centre. If you look at posts from those years people thought he had tunnel vision, and just made poor decisions (toe drags all the time). He could have stood some centre time in the A maybe.
lol.
That’s right up there with the armchair GMs who evaluate coaches based on the key metric of time out utilization
That’s right up there with the armchair GMs who evaluate coaches based on the key metric of time out utilization
Nonetheless it was the case that a whole lot of people thought he'd be better at wing, citing that and his play with Backlund. And they weren't wrong about what he was doing. They were wrong about whether he could work his way out of it.
