Solid goaltending? I hope so. We've seen goalies play well elsewhere only to suck here, but I would agree I'm generally more confident in ullmark than any others we've had since Anderson.
He is a career .919 sv% with a career low of .905 - if we had .905 level of goaltending last season we may have made the wildcard. He is a good goalie - period. The reality is the last few goalies we have had aren't legit starters.
Stu/pinto/Norris? We don't know that. We also don't know if Norris ever plays a solid 2 way game ever again. We also don't know if stutzles career high in points is behind him. We also don't know if pinto improves much over what he is. We assume, but we don't know.
Norris put up 30 points in 50 games last season while not having any off season training and clearly never feeling comfortable. Neither his skating nor his IQ is affected by his shoulder, so if he feels like the shoulder is stable, I don't see any reason he isn't a valuable contributor. Even if Pinto just maintains his average, he will be valuable - 54 points, a + player, good in the dot and can PK while being a 2nd unit PP guy? I will take him.
Sure, a decent top 4...but is Chabot getting injured? Does Jensen take another step back at his age and play more like a #5? If Sanderson doesn't develop an elite offensive game to go with his defensive game, who provides offense? Chabot sucks on the powerplay, so hopefully thats Sanderson on pp1.
Injuries are part of the game and I think Chabot may benefit physically from more reasonable deployment.
The worry over a 33 year old falling off a cliff is so overblown, it isn't funny. He is a defensive Dman and while being quicker always helps, we don't need any flash from him so I believe he will be fine.
Sanderson still has loads of room for improvement but he isn't going to be an offensive star, and we don't need him to be. You say Chabot sucks on the PP but in general, he is our best offensive D, currently by a fair margin.
Coach? We don't know what he'll do. Every coach we've ever hired talked a big game. Means nothing until we get results. He's not a proven or a check mark. He's a question mark.
He has structure and holds players accountable - that is something we have missed since Guy Boucher. It is better than what we have had in a while.
More jam? Sure...but less skill...and we already were a team that was talked about as not being skilled enough to outscore other teams to win games... So I guess we'll see how it affects an average skilled team to lose some skill. I agree we needed more jam, but I was hoping to get more skill and jam. Not more jam at the expense of skill. We already don't have enough skill to go with the big boy teams.
Where is the drain on skill? Perron is about as skilled as Tarasenko but adds more jam and a different way to create offence. Amadio and Joseph are a wash, other than speed.
Greig is another skill guy with jam, that is flying under the radar IMO. I expect a big jump from him this year as well. A full season of Norris and Pinto is a big jump in skill. The only place we see a drop is from JC to Jensen but I think that is more than made up for with solid D and contributions from our core.
Like I said, the stars are aligned! Only good things.