Suddenly it was all Josi/Forsberg/Duchene and they scored a ton and... the team went into the tank in the standings despite that.
It's difficult to even unwrap what happened. There was the layoff in February, there was Saros, did the Herd line get worn out, what happened to make the big money stars get handed the ball to that extent? They piled up points. But the team was much worse.
In retrospect, the roster was just dire.
You had:
Forsberg - granlund - Duchene
Herd
Kunin - johansen - cousins
Tolvanen - mccarron - tomasino
(And variations thereof, including Olivier and matt luff—two more grind guys)
So essentially we had three grind lines, more or less. Joey isn’t really an all-grind center but we insisted on skating him with kunin and cousins, who are basically just hustle guys.
Tolvanen and tomasino had good defensive metrics, which they never got credit for, but they were on the shortest offensive leash of all time. And they skated with mccarron when they played at all.
Early on, the herd line surprised everyone. It was pretty salty for a grind line, and it overmatched a lot of people’s weaker lines. But then everyone in the league figured it out: herd was the de facto 2nd line. So people started scheming them that way, and the preds’ answer was, uh, insufficient.
Because you had Joey saddled with subpar wings, and you had the kids saddled with pressure to play mistake free while skating with a non-nhl center.
The PP was still decent, because you had all four actual top-6 forwards plus Josi. And Duchene and forsberg together were (have always been) dangerous.
And actually by year’s end, when they finally brought glass back up, the kid line was pretty good. Because again, everyone was scheming for 9-95 and then herd. And that left Tolvy-glass-tomo to feast on third line types. They were raw and they weren’t dominant, but they were certainly a bright spot.
(So naturally Hynes waived Tolvanen, sent tomasino to AHL, and healthy scratched glass. But that’s a different year)
TLDR—forsberg and duchene were legit, herd line was too much for bottom 6 lines to handle but not enough as a de facto second line, and the other two lines were not good enough and incoherently constructed.