Maybe Arty should have spent his summer in LA going to dance lessons instead of working out.
I think one of the biggest perils of this roster construction is that you have a WIDE age/experience gap between the tenured Cup winners and the fruits of the rebuild.
Hockey games might be won by skills, but playoff success is based on will. You need a common goal with everyone pulling in the same direction.
This team has old - very old in some cases - players who have already achieved success and have spent the majority of the last decade just accepting what comes with their fat salaries and satisfied bellies. They haven't played poorly, just without any kind of hunger that was displayed while chasing the Cup.
Compare that with young kids coming in, being forced to play out of position while the strengths of their games aren't being nurtured. Kids who sit for games at a time after playing well. Kids who KNOW they are ready but KNOW they can't get their chance due to cap concerns.
What's the commonality there? The old vets here have never been known as leaders, just respected. At some point the kids need to be allowed to take over the on-ice ownership of the club, but that keeps getting delayed and delayed with every Danault, Arvidsson, Fiala, Gavrikov and Dubois that gets added into the middle of the team.
The model here is broken. Its not the skill, its the inability to get a collection of indivuduals with differing goals to coalesce into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Its no surprise that some of these kids like Kaliyev and Bjornfot are falling thru that gap. Good debuts, then shut down by veteran adfitions. They lose confidence, lose time, and are suddenly out of waivers options as their ELCs are ending.
Its terrible, terrible management. The worst in team history. Its actually unbelievable how they can screw up in so many ways.
