RememberTheName
Conductor of the Schmid Bandwagon
I think Hughes is playing fine, but it is absolutely fair to say that he has some areas he needs to work on. I'd like him to stop trying to do so damn much every single play. Some turnovers are expected because of the sheer amount he has the puck on his stick, but I feel like the rate at which he coughs up the puck is a bit higher than I'd like it to be. That can also be attributed to having shit linemates, but I still think he tries to do a little too much a fair amount of the time. Faceoffs, yikes. I honestly think that if you gave this kid an actual set of linemates, not a single person would be complaining about him. Instead, he's stuck with f***ing Palmieri who doesn't give a shit and he has absolutely no chemistry with on his right wing and a revolving door of meh (sans Bratt) like Kuokkanen or Sharangovich or even Bastian on his left side. This dude needs actual linemates to play with. It's not even like he's struggling to set up chances, its just that no one can finish chances and no one on his wings is good enough to actually draw the defense's attention off of him, so entire defenses are just collapsing on him and forcing him to cough it up. Not much you can do when your linemates aren't doing anything to help you out. This offseason, moves better be made to get the kid actual linemates. And I'm not talking about whatever rookies we decide to call up. He needs legit veteran linemates to help him drive the play. Plain and simple. There is no other way around it. That is the #1 thing holding back this team. If we keep having a revolving door of rookies coming in and out of the lineup, we are never going to get better. We need established veterans to come in and lead this team. Fitzy may not like it, but we better be prepared to make a splash in UFA or a big trade for some kind of forward. I thnk its funny how solid our defense has been this year, as that was our perceived weakness coming into the season, and how god awful our offense has been. Acquiring veteran wingers has to be priority #1 this offseason.