The Canes won a Stanley Cup with the guy who could have led them to better results and have have not made a Cup final with the guy that leads them places.
I get your point, I just think it's a funny twist of the stats.
Sure, but both of them were gamers in the playoffs.
It’s very rare for a player to
increase his scoring in the playoffs, when scoring falls off by as much as half a goal per game — Aho is one of those guys whose numbers actually go
up under those conditions. That’s a quality you generally see in players who get a lot of media hype for their intangibles.
Staal was also really good in the clutch. His size and reach came in handy when it came down to prison rules. His 2006 and 2009 playoff runs were exceptional. Unfortunately they were his only two playoff runs in his 20s.
The difference between them is that the Canes
make the playoffs with Aho. He shows up night after night to contribute to a consistent winning culture. Staal was notorious for sleepwalking through games that didn’t have urgency scripted into them, such as everything before Christmas. He set entirely the wrong tone for a team that severely underachieved during his captaincy.
but you can’t blame him for not taking you places.
Why not? He was the captain, #1C, 2OA franchise defining draft pick, EA cover athlete, face of the franchise. Cruising along with 70-point seasons wasn’t good enough, and on two different occasions those teams missed the playoffs on the last day of the season.
I don’t mean to roast him completely on here, he was a damned good player and a franchise player of sorts, but he absolutely left effort on the table and as a result he has a weird legacy of being good but not the HHOF’er he should have been. It’s not entirely clear whether the Canes will retire his number, which would have been hard to imagine in 2013, and that speaks to the extent to which his reputation fell off.