Drysdale's development and health is nearly as important as anything on our roster other than Michkov. He still has the potential to tilt that trade in our favor, should be easy for him since he put on 50 pounds of muscle in 3 months, that's what Comcast told me and Comcast has never lied to me or made my bill more expensive than it should be.
Yeah, agreed. Given the Cutter fiasco after they had hailed him and Michkov as The Franchise-Solving-1-2-Punch, they
really need him to pan out. Not just for the looks. The team really needs that.
It takes about five moments of reading the initial trade thread to see my dismay; I was
not a fan of his. It only takes a few pages more before you see me huffing the "Ah, but Eakins!" cope-gas. Eakins is the one coach I hold in higher disdain than AV. He is the only coach who isolates his dmen more, and has even less of an idea of how to support them in his end or use them going the other way. Truly, escaping him at his age means he has enough time to unlearn The Badness!
His early games here intrigued me. He was highly mobile and willing to try making plays with the puck. We won't talk about defense, but even on the attack without the puck his constant mobility at least forced other teams to pay attention to the guy constantly trying to be open, and that kind of thing can force lapses from the opposition as they ponder their coverage and handoffs and such, depending on scheme/gameplan. But then we started seeing the thing that we see with every D prospect: regression. He became stagnant on the blueline. Less shifting to be open and a threat, lots more camping the proper angles to ensure no risk of fast counterattack. Playmaking disappeared in favor of the safe plays. Get pucks deep, no cross-ice, etc. This dismays me. Those are the only strengths to his game and they're the exact thing we've seen this team vanish out of many a Dman. Vanish the strengths and all you have is weakness.
I am troubled by the course he traveled last season. On the plus side, his health might make all that irrelevant. On the down side, his health. I really want to see him succeed. He has the skill to be fun and effective. If he's allowed to be. On the other plus side, I am convinced CG is also a pretty big project. His playmaking is nonexistent and he needs to completely change his whole shooting game. Tall orders. Wouldn't be surprised to learn in the end that we took a bullet by dodging another.