Kruger is good at 1 thing .... winning face offs ..... oh wait .... advanced stat people dont believe winning face offs mean anything .... he also can win a face off... skate toward the blue line and dump the puck in and GET off the ice .... helps your advanced stats ... lets call him Mr Corsi.
He Sux .... weakest player on his skates in the league ... spare part that will be replaced after next year
offense ? whats offense?
I don't really care about his faceoff prowess. If you care about faceoffs, great, you should be glad he's back.
I care about the fact that he can match-up against top 6 competition with heavy dzone starts and consistently flip the ice, so that our top 9 can go to work with easier matchups and maximize their offensive output. The team needs
somebody besides Toews that can do it, and Q trusts to do it (for as long as he's here, anyway). It doesn't work having 2 guys on the entire roster that can find the Dzone without a map, and putting them both on the top line.
We tried the old-timey useless 4th line strategy last season. It didn't go well. EVERYBODY's production dropped, and in it's place you got a barely marginal uptick in production from a 4th line that barely played. Hurray.
I don't know if Kruger can still go at the hero level he could before. Remains to be seen. If he can't, it's only one year.
Honestly, aside from the acronym, a Kunitz-Kruger-Kampf shutdown line sounds pretty good on paper. There's just no chance Q keeps Kunitz out of the top 6.