What is your definition of a strong forward group?
3 PPG scorers (Miller Pettersson Boeser) 2 of which are top25 NHL players followed by a top50 5v5 scorer in (Garland) and then 6 forwards (Debrusk Heinen Hoglander Sprong Joshua Sherwood) who were in the top190 which by very definition puts them into the top6 of NHL forwards last season in 5v5 production. Even Suter Blueger offer proven top9 production and quality utility and Raty has shown quality upside.
Weird take
i mean dallas, florida, toronto, vegas and colorado (if they get one or both of nicushkin and landeskog back) all look way better up front to me, right?
vancouver are in the next tier down with a ton of teams like jersey, the rangers, ottawa, carolina, boston, tampa, winnipeg, blah blah blah
vancouver might look better on paper because they have ringers like hoglander and suter on the 4th line but all that means is some of the forwards on the roster are going to underwhelm because they won't get opportunity. meanwhile they're going to have to give high leverage minutes to someone like debrusk or heinen or sherwood because they have such a steep drop off from miller, boeser and pettersson to their next best forward
i fully recognize it's not this easy but wouldn't you prefer to see guentzel and insert-min-salary-guy-here over garland and debrusk on this roster? that'd give them two very good centers and two very good wingers. lindholm was underwhelming here but that was the right idea too allowing them to shift one of the 3 centers to the wing and ensure you had 4 very good players to deploy on the top two lines
the way things are now i expect miller and boeser will be fine regardless of who they play with and will perform fine but pettersson is going to underwhelm again because he'll be stuck with subpar wings and the team is going to need back to back career years from garland and joshua on the 3rd line to tread water
and i'm not being critical of management here. i think they did a reasonably good job given their circumstances. i kind of cringe at the term debrusk got and i'm slightly skeptical joshua will live up to his deal but it's hard to argue with the heinen, sprong or sherwood contracts. they didn't have the assets to make a trade and no one really moved that would have be an improvement anyways. but people aren't saying the forward group is as good as you can expect. they're saying it's one of the strongest in the league. i don't get it