We're talking about a 22 and 23 year old in the last year of their waiver exemption. Where does "rushing prospects" come into play there?
Larsson hasn't played top competition for two seasons now and he's been getting murdered by that secondary competition. It isn't 2016 anymore. He's been arguably the team's worst defenseman for close to two full seasons now.
The part where you're assuming that a player with ten games of quality NHL experience is suddenly relied upon to play regular top four NHL minutes with no fall back option in the instance the player suddenly hits a roadblock.
And whatever source you have that's telling you that Larsson isn't facing quality competition is probably also telling you that Benning sees some of the hardest minutes on the team. IE, it's false.
Understandably Larsson has struggled in recent seasons. He's had a heavier workload in the top four dealing with injuries to Sekera and Klefbom who were relied upon to carry a lot of that workload in 2016/17 and he's struggled with injuries himself along with the death of his father. He's 26. This isn't the end of the road for him.
When it comes to Larsson I honestly struggle to see how a defensive defenseman can look good in a situation where the only time he comes out on the positive end is when that top line is on the ice. Is it his fault that the majority of this roster outside of its top three forwards provides little to no offensive support?
It's difficult to quantify defense because it's defense. But in the instances you see other teams pinning our top lines in our defensive zone, it becomes abundantly clear that defending the cycle is incredibly important in terms of tipping the scales possession wise. Getting the puck back is important.
I'll take average PK work for 2 minutes per game and an actual impact in the other 10 minutes per game they play over what we have now.
There's basically no correlation between PK% and overall standings. Three teams in the top 10 last season finished with a PK ranked higher than 16th.
We've had some of the worst PK units for the past couple seasons. You can't tell me that preventing goals isn't an important part of winning hockey games.
Of course you hope for better results at even strength but you take the gains you can get, which at this point has been a night and day improvement of the PK. You throw a rookie in a depth role, you aren't putting him in a great position to produce anyways as seen by our handling of Puljujarvi. Meanwhile your PK ends up dead last in the NHL and you're devaluing your prospect depth.
As the season progresses you'll see some of those pretenders moved along and some prospects might even get looks. But making long-term decisions relying on these rookies to assume roles is how you ruin them. It's also how you end up paying them more than they're actually worth. See Benning, Caggiula.
