HisNoodliness
Good things come to those who wait
I'm not sure how we can slice it any better tbh. The obvious candidate:I hope Seider and Ed can play 45 minutes each with that lineup. That bottom 4 is f***ing putrid. Amongst the worst in the NHL.
Chiarot-Seider
Ed-Petry
Edvinsson has to learn the league next to a former two way D that can't skate or adapt his game. Since we will only have one pairing that we can trust, Seider and Chiarot will get way overworked, like last year, and Mo will essentially spend the year playing the PK at 5on5.
Gus and Maatta could try filling in for Petry and Chiarot, but the results forecast similarly. I do think Gus-Seider has a chance at being a fun pairing, but not really a very good one.
So I think Ed-Seider is probably our best bet. We'll just accept our second pairing getting absolutely annihilated whenever they touch the ice, and treat them like a third pairing. That means a tremendous workload on rookie Simon Edvinsson, but at least he'll be out there with a functional hockey player. Ditto for Seider.
The biggest problem is that if the pairing sucks, it will be impossible for us to just cast all of our defensive problems as being the fault of Walman, Chiarot, Petry, etc. Fortunately, it is all their fault, so Seider-Ed will crush it out there.