Lafferty is hard to judge because he has played his entire college career so far on an abysmally bad team. Last season he had 35 points when the entire Brown team scored only 66 goals (leading to a 4-25-2 record). So Lafferty contributed on 53% of their offense. And without scoring a single PP goal (he had 2 shorties, though). That's just insane. He definitely had a breakout year that really put him on our prospect map. But will his production translate or was it simply a case of Brown being a bad team and somebody had to score some points?
When players on bad teams score in hockey, it's not because "somebody had to score." There are plenty of shutouts in hockey. College hockey in general is particularly low-scoring. To score, you still have to find your way around the defense and beat the goalie. If you don't have enough talent to do that, you're not going to do that.
Plus, if there was a such thing as a "somebody had to score" effect, you'd expect at least some of it to show up on the powerplay, where some of the work of beating the defense was done ahead of time by the referees and goalies are easier to beat because they're screened so much of the time.
Speaking of that, I know this isn't the Brown University Bears hockey thread, but how do you not get a guy who has a hand in over half of your offense involved on the powerplay? They had three guys who scored powerplay goals, all forwards, so presumably those were the three forwards they actually used, and all of them were significantly less productive than Lafferty. You'd think maybe putting your team's best player on the ice when it's easiest to score might lead to more goals, but what do I know? I never coached any terrible hockey teams.
