How many 4th liners PK or produce significant points? I ask in earnest as I am not sure. We have been fortunate in the past with having guys like Barbashev and Sunqvist on our 4th line. But I'd assume a lot of teams have 4th liners much like ours. I don't think many PK or put up bunches of points. Maybe 20 guys league wide are play 10ish minutes and either are great on the PK or put up 20+ points.
Last year only 11 guys with an ATOI around what are guys are getting (11 minutes or less) scored 15 points or more. Only 3 had more than 20. Looking at PK minutes when sorting by total TOI/gm is a bit more difficult than I want to tackle right now.
Plus are guys are playing decent defense, at least by the results. Those 4 are the 4 lowest GA/60 for the team this year. Alexandrov has yet to be scored in 9 games and 75 minutes (knock on wood). There is value in being able to put guys out there and just kill time if your top 9 is scoring (which ours is not). You can rest your top 9 and not worry about the lead changing.
I'm not really arguing that these guys shouldn't be better. But we went out and got the best that was available for the very little money we had to spend. i don't think we should be vilifying the guys making $750k. We need to vilify the guys making the multiple millions that took up all the cap so we could only afford $750k NHL/AHL tweeners, or the GM who gave out those contracts (which to be fair might be what you were doing),
Also having good players in the AHL does help. Its good to give our young guys decent players to play with and create a winning culture. That might not be working perfectly right now (Tbirds are .500) but Frk and Highmore are the 2 leading point producers. They'd be much worse without them.
We can increase this even more to include Logan Brown, Josh Leivo and Jake Neighbours (even though he's no longer here). Because those three along with Walker, Toropchenko, Alexandrov and Pitlick are the 7 forwards with the least amount of ice time on the team before you get to our top 9 guys.
Of those 7, in a combined 70 games played they have 9 points. And half of those (4) are just from Leivo.
Of those players, Toropchenko is the only one who has gotten any type of valuable PK time (at least 30 seconds per game) and he ranks 220th in the league among forwards in that. That means each team, on average, has at least 6 forwards getting more PK time than he does. That means 3 full units for each team, before you get to Toropchenko. And of those 3 units per team, in looking at the list I am confident each team has 2-3 4th liners that are among that group.
I subscribe to the idea that a good 4th liner should be producing ~15 points per season. Anything that's 20+ is really good, but 15 is solid production for them. We have nobody even close to that pace right now.
In looking at the good teams around the NHL right now and their 4th lines, they are getting that production. I'll look at the 5-7 forwards that are getting the least amount of ice time for their teams to compare. These guys will all be at ~13 mins or below, just like the Blues' guys. Anyone at 14+ minutes is disqualified from these lists.
Boston: Nosek, Foligno, Smith, Frederic, Greer and Lauko. In 91 combined games they have a total of 35 points.
Vegas: Amadio, Lechyshyn, Kessel, Kolesar, Howden, Cotter and Carrier. 108 games, 30 points.
Carolina: Noesen, Stastny, Drury, Stepan, Martinook. 85 games, 21 points.
Tampa Bay: Maroon, Bellemare, Perry, Koepke, Colton, Namestnikov, Balcers. 111 games, 26 points.
New Jersey: Zetterlund, Holtz, McLeod, Wood, Boqvist. 73 games, 33 points.
Dallas: Gurianov, Glendening, Faksa, Blumel, Kiviranta. 79 games, 17 points. This is the only example who has weak production, but 3 of these guys average 2+ mins per game on the PK. And Dallas' PK is the 4th best in the NHL.
Islanders: Cizikas, Clutterbuck, Martin, Johnston, Soshnikov, Wahlstrom. 87 games, 24 points.
Toronto: Malgin, Clifford, Jarnkrok, Robertson, Holmberg, Aston-Reese, Engvall. 95 games, 25 points.
The ice times are all pretty similar. You could DOUBLE the Blues players' games and they would still be behind all of those teams by a good margin.
We have talked ad nauseam about our top guys. But ROR, Kyrou, Schenn, Thomas, Buch etc have picked up their play and are all playing much better lately. The thing that has stayed the same is our bottom of the lineup guys don't give us anything, and I believe that's a big factor for why this team is so inconsistent and just doesn't have it a lot of nights. We are a team that is supposed to be built on depth. That's going to be hard to win when we only have 3 good lines. Any team that has 4 good lines is beating us in a playoff series. I guess I'm just frustrated that we are trying the same thing we did last year, and are getting the same results. Actually, worse results. I too want Springfield to be good but the guys we have aren't cutting it IMO. I don't think I'm asking for a lot here, I just want some bottom of the lineup guys that average more than 1 point this season, and/or could kill a penalty now and then. Right now we don't have that. All the other good teams do.
