Habs Halifax
Loyal Habs Fan
I don't know how PLD got so over rated?? His stats for big man in weak junior league were only 1.5ppg. Not amazing. Only averages 54 points over 82 NHL games. Which is good, but not high end.
It's much deeper than that with Dubois's potential. He's more like a 60-70 pts guy under the right situation (playing with talent) and he offers that big body that skates well which frees up space for the talented players on his line.
Yeah, he doesn't have a good character resume and there are trends. But I don't ignore all the trends and only look at some. One of the trends I clearly see is he fades when placed with less talent but he produces when placed with talent. When I was interested him last year, I wanted to only pay him $7M or $7.5M max. Kings over reached with both the trade and contract and then played him 3C pretty much most of the season. Horrible management IMO.
With me, it's a usage problem. Expecting him to carry a line by himself is miss management for what he provides. It's not the type of player he is. I hope the Kings do buy him out before he turns age 26 on Jun 24th and then, we can sign him for 3 or 4 years at like $4M max.