How are you confident Donato will be something he's never done until last season?
because it's in line with the rates he was scoring at in those previous seasons while allowing for more playing time. i take his increased production in a higher role this season as indication that playing more than bottom-six minutes he is likely to hold his own and maintain as a ~2p/60 player, give or take about 0.4p/60.
Donato generally got a little less than 14 mins on teams, not because hes he been limited by coaches or high talent around him, because he didn't preform to it.
repeating myself, and yet he was comparably efficient to both of bertuzzi and turbo, more so at 5v5 and less so all strengths. if you want to present a QoC argument to deflate that, the floor is very much open to you.
The season you expect of Donato to repeat, hes done once.
a repeat of 24-25 for him is the most i think one could reasonably expect without being overly optimistic. that's why i put the upper end of the projection at 60 points. i don't see why i am supposed to put that outside of all possibility considering he just did it. conversely, i don't see why i'm supposed to just assume his scoring drastically regresses to be even lower than what he was doing the year previous with an even worse hawks team.
for direct comparison's sake, 23-24 donato scored 1.65p/60 (the worst single season scoring rate of his career btw), 24-25 donato scored 2.85p/60. if donato played the minutes he did in 24-25 with the scoring rate he had in 23-24, he'd be good for about 35 points. so adjust my projection down a bit to 35-55 points if you like. i don't think it changes things very much.
The seasons people expect of Bertuzzi/Teuvo, are seasons they've done 5 times each
and i expect next year for donato to have a season that is somewhat better than his first in chicago (his career worst) and somewhat worse than his second (his career best). this shouldn't be very hard to believe i don't think.
Per 60 is never some garntuee, you're good to produce more if you get the icetime.
of course it isn't a guarantee. the facts at hand are he has maintained middle-six rates over nearly a decade, and this last season when he was given more minutes, he outperformed those rates. i think that indicates that he is at the very least more than a fourth liner, which is what i set out to debunk from the outset.
It should be clear why confidence is there for those who have done it vs expecting a career year to be the new norm of a veteran player.
said it once, said it a million times: donato doesn't have to make the rate from his career year his new normal to make what i'm saying correct. he literally just has to do marginally better than the worst scoring rate he ever put up in his entire career while maintaining a middle/top-six depth chart role and powerplay time in an anemic forward core. if he maintained ~2.85p/60, he would be an unambiguously better offensive producer than either of the other two, which is not and has never been what i am arguing we should expect.
