You also posted stats from how players played last year, and it already says expect more goals. Yet it doesn’t include the effect of adding two legitimate offensive threats for a season adds to a roster. For example, Kuzmenko really turned the corner in March, playing his best hockey by far to finish the year. From March to the end of the season Kadri’s p/60 was 3.31 from his usual 2.84 prior. Sharangovich getting the additional help as well jumped from 2.94 p/60 from 2.31. Even with a majority of the vets mailing it in post trade deadline, Kuzmenko provided a large boost to the players he played with. Same as Mantha, who adds a seriously legitimate shooting threat to whichever line he plays on. Things that aren’t even reflected in the stats you posted, yet it still expects high totals. It also doesn’t include the powerplay, which seems primed for a boost this year with added options and based on how it finished the year prior.
You used the game played argument, but forget to realize the kind of player who play 45 games which are replacement level guys. I.E players who can be replaced and not notice any difference. So you say “but they’ll only play 45 games”, but someone of relatively equal value will play those other 37. Our top of the roster players missed roughly 15-20 games total last year, so yes there will be goals lost but pending some brutal injuries which we haven’t seen since Monahan, the total goals lost won’t be anywhere near 20 let alone 40.
Also I heavily encourage you to post a poll on the main boards on who would add more offense to a team, Chris Tanev or Andrei Kuzmenko. Yes we will get pinned more, and Tanev was a huge loss in starting the play the other way, but you have to understand that an improved forward core has much more of an impact on creating offense than… a defensive defenseman. Like you have to see the logic that Cale Makar getting the puck to Ryan Reaves will be a lot less conducive to gaining offense than Erik Gudbranson rimming the puck along the boards to McDavid, right? Breaking up plays and making a good first pass is important, but unless we are depending on blowing the zone and expecting seem passes or stretch passes on the daily, losing non-offensive defenseman and gaining offensive forwards will increase 5v5 scoring, that’s a pretty simple concept. Given the simplistic nature of our breakout (seriously, when we force a turnover in our zone how often did we do anything other than just head man the puck to a forward), we aren’t losing much to begin with anyways other than our ability to break up zone pressure. As a defenseman myself, I can tell you how much easier a breakout is when you have better forwards on the ice to begin with. To end all this, we also still have Andersson and Weegar who will be likely anchoring two separate pairs, so it’s not like we are bereft of two way defenseman to begin the season either
We added a player who scores 20 in his sleep (almost literally if some people are to be believed), and another guy who’s paced for 40 goals 3/4 of the time he’s been in the league so far. Our powerplay will be better, and we have 3-4 young forwards who will now have another season under their belt for experience. Losing two defenseman who combined for 49 points will not ruin the 5v5 offense as much as a full season of a guy paced for 71 and another who paced for 50 on a much worse offense than ours. Guys like Kuzmenko, Kadri, Sharangovich, and Coleman could all regress to the extreme and I could very easily be wrong, but pretending it’s impossible for us to score more goals is equally as wrong.