Here’s the thing with Suter.
He can play centre and wing, and has the offensive upside required to at least play in the top 6 in a crunch. He has decent puck skills and can score goals. Dickinson had minimal offensive ability and like you said was completely out of sync when he was tried anywhere but the 4th line.
Dickinson also has never scored more than 9 goals in his career. His shot, playmaking, pretty much everything offensively he was terrible. He was slow, soft, and couldn’t keep up with play. He was never really good defensively either.
With Suter, you know you’re getting 14-15 goals, solid PK ability, and versatility throughout the line up.
See, this is the problem with evaluating a player like Dickinson purely based on one disaster season where he was shoehorned into the wrong roles and never seemed to mesh with poor, unstructured coaching and systems. While also apparently playing through a broken hand to boot.
Dickinson everywhere
outside of Vancouver that one season, was known for his speed and tenacity. That was basically the hallmark of his game. Just a fast, hardworking, no frills utility player who took care of his own end.
It obviously didn't work out here under those particular miscast circumstances, but that doesn't completely invalidate the guy as a useful player in a more appropriate role.
It's bizarre that some people think Suter will assuredly be worse than Dickinson, when Dickinson was pretty damn terrible for Vancouver. Like, he was slow, no offense, couldn't play center, and wasn't even good on the PK.
I don't think many people believe that. Especially not in the role that we glaringly needed right now. Dickinson would be a far worse fit than Suter to play a sort de facto 3C role with skilled offensive-minded players. Suter has a more appropriate skillset to at least have a shot at being useful there, when we already have a backfill for Dickinson in Bluegers now to fill any of that other role.
But as above...judging Dickinson as a player solely based on one catastrophic sample out of his career absent context, is a super parochial way of thinking about it. For all we know, Dickinson could've been a great natural fit with Tocchet behind the bench. With more structured game and asking for different things out of his players, deployed in a way that made more sense to his strengths/limitations. Leaning entirely on the one major outlier year (good or bad) is typically not a reliable way of assessing players.
Yeah. This is a darn good comparison really. He's basically a "rich man's Dries". Who has the same sort of decent offensive skillset as what
@MS described as basically a 3W or 5C, but less of those major deficiencies in size+skating that make Dries relatively ineffective at the NHL level.
It was an area that this team clearly needed to improve if they're going to get anything out of our surplus offensive wingers. Whichever of them end up being the overflow from the Top-6...the reality is, we've basically got 7 wingers who effectively need offensive minutes with a skilled Center who can at least reasonably distribute the puck. 8 if Pearson throws a wrench in things by trying to make his comeback.
That Center certainly wouldn't be Dickinson. It's probably not Bluegers who also plays a very direct "simple" game. It's not anything Aman has shown to date. It's not Dries who is too slow and weak to contribute effectively.
Pius Suter is...vaguely in the mold of a guy who could work for that role. There's a reason two other teams have already let him mosey on along his way, despite looking "decent on paper". I think a lot of people have let some counting stats and charts unduly influence their perceptions of him as a better player than he actually is.
But...he's at least an upgrade on Dries. If they can keep his minutes protected enough, he should at least give guys like Garland/Hoglander/Podkolzin/Beauvillier/et al something they can viably work with in a tertiary scoring role.
