All things considered the timing of this thread is pretty strange considering he was a top contributor for Team Finland in a best-on-best tournament and has scored at a point per game pace for Montreal since then (with some of the lowest TOI on the team).
Yeah he had a really cold streak before that when the whole team was worn out from a rough schedule and lost like 9 games in a row. It happens.
I think the issue here is that expectations and reality aren't really meeting up. If we take a step back, there's a pretty obvious reason that we were able to pick him up for table scraps at $8.7m. Teams don't trade $8.7m players unless they're worth less than $8.7m.
We also established that much about 8 months ago, so I'd just like to take this opportunity to say congratulations to anyone catching up now. Thanks for joining us.
What's lost in the sauce in this discussion is that the guy is here to do one job: score goals. On our team, Caufield is scoring in 49% of our games, Laine is at 41%, and in 3rd we have Suzuki at 30%.
So we're a team that's starved for goal scoring, we bring in a scorer, he scores, and people complain that he's not a do-it-all, go-go type.
Add what looked like a potentially career-ending injury in the preseason and I'd say he's more or less above what I expected him to be.
As a side note, I imagine every Habs fan would like to see him play more games with more gusto. But that's just not going to happen. I wouldn't go looking for Porsche's at the Honda dealership and you guys shouldn't either.
