As for the negativity brigade, Not hiding from his plus minus. But I Think plus minus is an atrocious way of quantifying a players impact. That said his impact has been as he called it "horrible" since 1/1.
Agree with this and dont doubt he can return to form. Our forwards are getting more skilled though with the emergence of Boeds and Hanzel, and adding Ribs. This allows us to not rely on PMD as much. On top of that we already have OEL and Rundblad/Gormely in the pipeline. This team excelled with more stay at home defencemen. Perhaps OEL and Gormely is all they need in that realm. Murphey isn't half bad at zone entrance either.
Stone and Schlemko all at time cannot keep the puck in the opposing teams zone, they should not be on the PP anymore. Stone/Klesla/Morris are all not quick enough to carry the puck into the offensive zone by themselves (Schlemko is the exclusion here). Klesla at times is extremely solid in his end. At one point he was alright in the offensive zone, this skill set has vanished this year. Morris, unfortunately, has all but done the opposite. He has lost his composure in his end and often takes senseless penalties. However, he has been great on the PP and at times excellent on the PK and I imagine is a leader.
Stone/Schlemko have been very mediocre on both ends. No specialty. You could say Stone has his shot and Schlemko has an underestimated speed. But these are the pieces I see hurting the team the most on the blueline. When one of Z/Klesla/Morris have been out, it seems both of these players are in and defensive lapses become habitual. I truly think Murphy can hang now, but only if he is on the 3rd line and only plays on the PK when there are injuries.
This is getting long winded and I am losing my train of thought, but with all of our defensive depth this is who I feel comfortable seeing on PK. OEL, Z, Klesla and sometimes Morris. Murphy was an alright fill-in. Klesla looked great tonight on it, but has been terrible on it as well this year, same for Morris. Out of those four three of those players have missed significant time. WCF year I was happy with Rosival, Klesla, Morris, Auccion, and OEL being on the PK. That year Schlemko was fine filling in for injuries.
The WFC players look a lot different than the players this year. And even thought some of those names are the same, they haven't played the same way as they did 2 years ago. Rosival/OEL, Klesla/Auccoin, those are brutal shutdown pairings (forgive me if those weren't the correct pairings, but just thinking about that now makes me drool). Long story short, we got some players on the blue line that aren't willing to get black and blue.