That bastard would have to be a pretty rock solid 5v5 player to help this team more than Garland. Probably like Rakell level, the way he's playing now.
Are we talking about a ~5 mil AAV price range to replace Zucker? Who's a candidate then?
Before he left Arizona, he put up 39 points in 49 games. The season before that was also strong. This isn't new. I mean yeah coaches don't use him on PP1's and there's that weakness (if it checks out), but he wouldn't be used there here either so that's irrelevant.
The reason he's not scoring as much this year is because Boudreau put him on the 3rd line like we did with Kessel, to spread the depth. It's probably a mistake though. There's no evidence to suggest that Boeser should be ahead of him in the depth chart. They're using the guy with 28 ESP's last year when Garland had 49.
His Center is Sheldon Dries, a dude with 15 points in 74 games for the career.
No stat in isolation tells the whole story. I'll take the fairness of rates over raw points to derive takeaways from any day of the week though.
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This is not middle six caliber 5v5 scoring in this league any way you slice it, rates or otherwise. Not even close. That's especially true considering 154 of his 266 games were for anemic Arizona. This is someone a coach would be happy with on L1.