Brent Burns is one of the best PP players on the team. If you are picking the best 4 players for EK to pass to, Burns is on the list. He was tied for 6th in PP goals and led in PP assists last year with no other QB to pass to his shot most nights.
Yet somehow the powerplay will be still be mid at best.
Our need is more scoring. No matter where we get it
There's only so much power play time. It doesn't matter if you've got the Tampa PP1 and the Avalanche as your PP2 if the lightning players stay out there 1:49 and the second unit gets 11 seconds. We have enough PP capable players. Adding more does nothing if they don't get significant, meaningful minutes. And if they do, it costs other good players their meaningful minutes.
74 of his points last season were 5v5
Karlsson beat Canes scoring leader Necas by 30 points
I will agree with this. Loading up our D with offensive minded d-men is a sneaky way to help score more goals, especially considering d-men skate a lot more than forwards every game. I just hope we find a way to keep a good stay at home type d-man for each pairing.
Sure, but as I said, then 4/6 of your other great defenseman are twiddling their thumbs every minute he plays. You're too concentrated in one area. Have great defense, sure, but when it comes at the expense of upgrading the forwards, when you're already stacked on D it's just redundant.
I'm just saying if they need scoring- which they do- then the 100 point defenseman that can be had for relatively cheap because of the publicly known trade request and flat cap limiting potential landing spots is a not a bad option.
How so?
Yeah but when Orlov walks and Karlsson is old making 11.5 and Burns retries, is Nikishin+Slavin enough to keep the cup window open?
Because instead of paying $10m to have those guys play less, you could instead get a forward that will actually play meaningful minutes like a top line winger.
While im not advocating for Karlsson, he would play more than a top line winger.
Yes, but my point is, I'd rather play a good D and good W than a great D and bad W. With Karlsson you have more dead money on the defense that's doing nothing on the bench. Copy and pasting my goal analogy from above:
Yeah, this is a terrible example, and I shouldn't have to explain why.
What bad wingers are we running?
not the best example though as you only have one goaltender at a time to eat up all 60 mins. When you have 120 mins of ice time you can divide that up pretty effectively between them all. PP is where you run the risk of losing an advantage those guys bring.
