Agreed. I'm hardly a pollyanna but people complained about Kasper not being in the opening lineup. Now he's playing. People complained about Johanssen not getting more of a look. Now he's getting that.
I haven't seen a lot of acknowledgment of it. Now it's just back to how much Copp and Chiarot suck.
This forum has gotten so negative that now I'm apparently an optimist here. lol
Fair point.
You're totally right. Because Edvinsson took so long to make it last year, and how willing we were to sit Holl most of the year, I think most of us saw Kasper being down with Johansson and Berggren sitting in the press box and feared that we'd once again run out vets over them unless forced by circumstances ie injuries.
That didn't happen! Great honestly. That's a big win for us. Plus Edvinsson-Seider has become our default first pairing. Ed is still making some rookie mistakes (admittedly fewer) and Lalonde is tolerating that on the first line. For Derek "we need to manage risk better" Lalonde, that's big.
I'll also say though that as long as we are a team that's struggling to be .500 while getting out shot 2-1 most nights, you're going to see people be negative. There's a very real fear that we have been quite lucky these first ten games and should expect worse results from here on out.
I think a lot of that fear stems form personnel (Copp, Petry, Chiarot, etc. as you said), some of it is our system (dump and chase at 5 on 5 unless the rush is clear, generate on the powerplay, turtle with the lead, play a tight box around the net defensively to minimize high danger chances at the expense of challenging for possession on the outside). Hopefully, a lot of it was the flu that went through the league.
I was very unhappy with our opening light lineup, but now I think our lineup is as good as we can make it with the players we have.