D was a clear weakness, but if I'm being honest, I expected it to improve based on pushing guys like Mete, J.Brown, MDZ and Zaitsev out of the picture. Sanderson is a huge addition who I was really hyping up all offseason and he's pretty much come as advertised or better, so why aren't we seeing progress, well part of it is only having a healthy group for the first 7 games.
The other issue is the forwards who we lost were the same guys that helped cover for the weak D group, C.Brown, Paul, Formenton all out for more offensive minded guys, and an injury to Norris.
The way the team is built makes it susceptible to key injuries derailing everything and of course that's what happened. I'm a bit surprised how bad things got but oh well.
All of those guys are essentially the same as our guys outside of Chabot/Zub/Sanderson.
We definitely got an upgrade, and a huge one, with Sanderson.
Everywhere else it is either status quo, or a bit of a decline (Zaitsev/Holden/Hamonic getting worse as time goes on, as should be expected).
We definitely got injuries, like most teams, even worse than average, I think they are being severely over-attributed to the teams extremely poor structure and roster
We have a very weak group. from top to bottom. We can put up goals, but that comes at the expense of our forwards being very weak defensively, I don't think Norris makes a difference in the grand scheme in that respect.
We are just weak from top to bottom at the D slot. Very poor defensively overall, and poor offensively overall. We atre dressing 3+ guys every night who shouldn't be NHL regulars at this point in time. Fully healthy we have 3 guys who shouldn't.
Our goalies are average at best, and give up demoralizing goals nearly every other game