MortiestOfMortys
Registered User
In your defense, Tage proved everyone wrong. From 2018-2021, he was scoring 0.91 p/60 at 5v5, which was 445th in the league for players over 1000 minutes in that span. Then from 2021-2024, he scored 2.56 p/60, which was 16th in the league for that group. Words you might use to describe that kind of jump include "extraordinary," "unpredictable," and "freakish."I see a lot of people saying Dvorsky doesn’t look close to ready for the NHL. There’s few kids who can join the NHL and not have a rocky transition.
When Schwartz joined the team, it looked like he was going to get killed every time he got hit.
Snuggerud has some of the same. When he gets hit he goes down fairly easily.
Tarasenko is the only young forward prospect I can think of who really fit in right away. He already had the strength and athleticism . It probably helped him out playing in the KHL against men.
Snuggerud is almost 21 (June 1), while Dvorsky will be 20 on June 15. Dvorsky looks stronger on his skates than Snugg so far.
Every organization has to decide if playing in the NHL is what’s best for the player. Can the player grow his game more in the NHL than the AHL, or other league.
The one player I was absolutely proved wrong about was Tage Thompson. I legitimately didn’t think he would survive in the NHL. I’m normally on the side of giving young players plenty of rope or time to get acclimated, but to me he looked beyond horrible. His skating was extremely clumsy and he looked lost. Kudos to him for figuring it out.
Dvorsky’s confidence, patience, and control of the puck is what impresses me. This will probably be his best attributes in the NHL. It’s similar to Thomas, and Pietrangelo. He’s never going to skate like Thomas and I don’t think that’s a big deal.
I would bet on Dvorsky being a full time Blue next year.
For comparison, Brett Howden (taken one pick after Tage in 2016) scored 1.2 p/60 from 2018-2021 (336th league-wide), and 1.38 p/60 from 2021-2024 (318th). Some of that comes down to differences in opportunity in VGK vs. BUF. But there is very, very little evidence to suggest that anybody's "breakout" should happen on the scale of what Tage did. And it took Tage 145 games to get there.
Now, w/r/t Dvorsky, the positive sign in comparison to Tage (fair comparison or not) is that he's off to a better start in the AHL. He turned in a .75 P/G season as a 19 year old, whereas Tage scored a career 0.59 P/G record in that league. DD's results in the NHL so far have been frankly abysmal, but there is a long way to go, and very little reason to toss out a pretty substantial pile of evidence suggesting he'll stick at some point. Especially not based on <18 minutes of ice time.