I liked Poehling as a draft eligible, and I thought it was a solid buy low contract. I see nothing wrong with giving him top 9 usage to see what you have. More than that, I encourage it.
Now that I got that out of the way......the pattern with Tortorella is clear as day. He is obsessed with turning 4th line players that fit his preconceived notions of what "honest hockey" looks like into middle 6 players. Poehling has been a career JAG 4th liner through age 24. But Tortorella wants to see if this 20 point player is actually a 30 point player. It's emphatically his focus.
He did it with Cates, although Cates got more absurd usage to compensate for (and inflate) his near league bottom offensive impacts. In preseason, Tortorella was gushing about Cates' offensive upside: "A lot of people don’t talk about his offense. I think he had a good offensive year and how much I gave him as such a young guy that switched positions from wing to center at a National Hockey League team, a team that was struggling to find its way last year and going through the process and I still think he put up some pretty decent numbers. That’s the next step for him as far as I’m concerned." That spot on evaluating has been rewarded with 4 points in 18 games.
But meanwhile, there's a 50 point player who is the same age that is being healthy scratched after just recording 4 points in 4 games. Maybe that 50 point player could be a 60-70 point player? But an actual ~50 point player is not important -- what's important is growing the 20 point guys into theoretical 30+ point guys at the expense of the former. Only in hockey.
