Fair points I suppose. It just seems like we’ve HAD those guys a lot in the past. Witkowski, Mcalrath, Tootoo, and even Kostin last year. None of the guys seemed to have an impact on having a better team and in fact, I feel like they all made us worse. It’s why we let all of them go.
I've seen these names brought up in the past and they're extremely irrelevant to this conversation. Mcilrath played 23 games over 2 seasons with a bunch of injuries. He didn't have any impact at all whatsoever, he was an AHLer who got called up.
People even bring up Too too saying he made the team worse. You know who else sucked? Guys like Joakim Andersson and Cory Emmerton. They got to be as bad at hockey or worse than Too too but no one talks about them because they made 0 impact and provided absolutely nothing. Tootoo at least did something that was different from a bunch of Vanilla players on the bottom lines.
Watson is a legit 500 NHL game guy who has spent lots of time puking and playing a regular shift. He's not an enforcer, he's a gritty fourth liners that hits like a truck and will fight aynone when his wires cross. But he can be trusted defensively and penalty killing which none of these other guys could do.
Last season with Tampa he didn't do much but the 2 years before that he averaged a double digit goal pace per 82 games as well.