Somebody's gotta get the d-zone starts and with both scoring lines being pretty shit defensively, it's the 3rd or 4th lines. /shrug
He definitely didn't get coached up, but he was pretty trash while he was here.
I talked about the whole myth of "Everybody plays awesome once they leave" thing people love to bring up. It's bullshit tbh. The only guys who really took off and hit level after leaving were Sprong and Lafferty. Sprong got the team their best defensive defenseman. Lafferty is a whatever loss, imo. Kap, Dumo, Schultz, JJ, Zucker, Reaves, Petry, CDS, etc., etc. are all just as forgettable elsewhere.
Don't get me wrong, the coaching staff is garbage. There's no way Sully and JR should've made it past the Habs play-in imo. But all the hand-wringing over ones that got away is just frustration over the state of the team, not realistically missing genuinely good players imo.