I saw Roy missing some assingments during camp, I saw him not reading how the play develop very well at times too, I saw him a bit lost in his own zone in the Q as well... I think you are confounding IQ with offensive creativity and vision.
For me Kidney has a very high IQ, he is just weak. Roy's IQ is decent, but not particulary high.
Strange how you can somehow recognize Roy being lost on the ice yet think Slavkovsky is not lost.....Roy absolutely maps the ice better than Slafkovsky and has a much more advanced concept of spacing and puck support. I am confident Slaf will greatly improve but if he had Roy's current IQ and vision he would be much more effective.
I do agree with your comment about IQ and vision/creativity.
Roy definitely has exceptional vision but that is not necessarily the same as hockey IQ. The latter can sometimes be tricky to access accurately until the player moves on to higher competition. Drouin is a prime example of this where people were entirely convinced that his hockey IQ was off of the charts in Halifax but it turns out they were conflating vision with IQ. This is why Drouin at times can make great passes and at other times make boneheaded giveaways. He has the vision to look for back door plays and cutters but doesn't have the IQ to diagnose the evolving environment around him.
I am on the fence with Roy as he has terrific hands and great offensive instincts but I am uncertain of how his understanding of the game will translate to the pro game given his current skating deficiencies. He clearly needs to improve his skating and I feel like that is very attainable considering it is only very recently that he began to take training seriously and has made huge leaps in development due to it.
Roy is polarizing in my own head as I can easily make an argument that he is just another junior star with glaring flaws that will keep him from finding success in the NHL. I can also make the opposite argument that he is smart and talented enough to overcome these obstacles with his new found enthusiasm for training and is headed for a bright NHL career. I think anyone who sits firmly in either camp is blinded by bias as nothing is remotely clear with Joshua so it is probably best not to become too tribal in this conversation, let's just wait and see if he works on his weaknesses this season.
Roy is a really interesting case….and I keep thinking does he have the “it factor”? Can he take another step? We know of his Q potential & he worked hard on the bottom 6 at WJC, showing an ability to be given a role (bottom 6) and acquitted himself well.
I guess what I’d like to see is Roy finding another “gear”, so to speak. He’s already projecting to be bottom 6 material but he looks (at times) to have more innate talent that perhaps not even he sees?
Pace, pace and pace.......this is the key to his future.
