Examining the Yzerplan - Part 2: Can it work and should we be impatient?

The second of a two-part series analyzing the state of the Detroit Red Wings

Previously: Part 1

On Friday I published the first part of my series looking at the state of the Detroit Red Wings’ rebuild and the so-called “Yzerplan”. Part 1 was a recap of the rebuild, beginning in the Ken Holland era and detailing the moves of Steve Yzerman as GM. After that it broke down the young core of the rebuild, including the prospect pool, and talked some about the draft strategy that the Red Wings have employed, focusing on polished two-way centers and drafting defensemen at astonishing rates, as opposed to high-skill offensive wingers. Today, in Part 2, we will build on where Part 1 left off, examining the merits of that draft/team-building strategy and then answering the ultimate question: should patience for the Yzerplan be running thing? Let’s examine it all:

Premium positions and building a championship team

At the end of Part 1, I remarked that the Red Wings have focused on drafting defensemen over forwards as a general philosophy. Moreover, at the forward position they have prioritized bigger, smooth skating, polished two-way centers, as opposed to higher skill, offensively creative wingers. I pointed out that this strategy often diverges with the stances of the Internet Scouts and has drawn some critiques from online punditry.

As someone who does love the beauty and creativity of raw offensive skill, I have to say that I tend to have some overlap with Internet Scouts but A) am always cognizant of the fact pre-draft scouting can be wrong and B) you need lots of different pieces to win big. I also have warmed up to the notion of “premium positions”, something that Steve Yzerman’s regime appears to believe in very strongly, the idea that since defensemen and centers are valued more highly in the NHL, you’re better off drafting them than trying to find them on the open market as established players.

This concept is very familiar to those who follow the NFL Draft and ironically, there’s an opposite dynamic in that league. In the NFL Draft, it is the Internet Scouts who harp relentlessly that some positions are more important and should be drafted higher, EDGE, QB, WR, OL, and DB. The Detroit Lions got roasted by the adherents of this philosophy after taking a RB and an ILB in the first round of this most recent draft. Yet in the NHL it’s reversed… it’s the teams who believe strongly in “premium positions”, taking centers and defensemen high in the draft while the Internet Scouts excoriate them for passing up skilled wingers, smugly rolling their eyes when a team "over-drafts a defenseman”.

The 2019 Blues are not a bad mold for what the Wings are trying to do [NHL.com]

The premium position rationale largely comes from the acquisition price for defensemen and centers. Last week we saw Winnipeg’s Pierre-Luc Dubois, a grossly overrated centerman, get traded to Los Angeles for a gigantic bundle of players and then extended on a massive contract. Top flight centers rarely hit the open market in free agency and even middle six ones are not easy to find in UFA, whereas wingers are typically in decent abundance. Likewise, I would argue that true top four defensemen (especially top pair) are the most difficult item to acquire in the NHL outside of an MVP-level star forward. Minutes munching defensemen who face top competition and succeed also rarely ever hit the open market and if they do, it’s at an advanced age where you grimace about impending decline.

Yzerman’s draft strategies seem to mirror this line of thinking. Load up on defensemen, take as many swings as you can to get legit top four defensemen, and then get deep at center. In theory, you should be able to find goal-scoring wingers to fill out your roster through free agency and the trade market. Of course, the lingering question still remains: can this team succeed and get back to contention without an elite, Hart Trophy sort of forward? Sure, a prospect or young player could become that, but no one presently looks imminently on track for that.

Conventional wisdom would argue that you do need a Hart-level forward. Most teams that win the Cup have one, but the molds that those players inhabit are different depending on team. On one hand, there are teams who had an Art Ross type forward, a transcendent offensive talent. Such teams include Chicago of the 2010s, the recent run for Tampa Bay, Colorado last year, Washington 2018, Pittsburgh under Crosby (and Lemieux), and most all of the dynasties of yore.

On the other hand, there are teams with a Hart-level forward who wasn’t necessarily an elite scorer, but was a dominant two way presence. These teams are Vegas this year (hello, Mark Stone)¹, St. Louis 2019 (Ryan O’Reilly), LA Kings of the 2010s (Kopitar), Boston 2011 (Bergeron), and the dynasty Red Wings (Yzerman/Fedorov/Datsyuk/Zetterberg). To round it out, we should also mention the Devils’ dynasty of the 90s/00s, where their best forward was… Patrik Eliaš(?)², the 07 Ducks, who had a very good but aging Selanne at F and whose two best players were both defensemen, and the 06 Hurricanes, a team built on a deep but not necessarily star studded forward group.

Does it help to have a Patrick Kane or a Nathan MacKinnon or a Nikita Kucherov? Absolutely. Does that alone win you a Cup? No. And can you win without one? I would say yes. There are lots of different ways to build a team and the sort of squad the Red Wings are seemingly aiming to build, one with polished two-way centermen, a deep roster of scorers over A-list stars, and a monstrous blue line, has won championships before, as recently as, uh, one month ago.

The Golden Knights have a lot of awesome players but no F who has ever come particularly close to a Hart Trophy or an Art Ross. But they had a great top four on D, a hot goalie, a great coach, and went four lines deep of scorers with two-way ability throughout their F group. You can absolutely do it that way. It may take the analytics nerds to finally snap out of their conservatism towards big swings to get it done, but I would be shocked if the Carolina Hurricanes don’t eventually win the Cup using this exact model given how consistently they are putting a 110+ point team on the ice.

Of course, I’m writing this as if it’s easy to do. The Red Wings have a loooooong way to get there. Let’s take the 2010s Kings model as an example. They just need Marco Kasper or Nate Danielson to turn into Anže Kopitar, Seider to finish his evolution into Drew Doughty, Sebastian Cossa to become Jonathan Quick, and the remainder of the prospects to turn into useful NHL players like Slava Voynov, Alec Martinez, Willie Mitchell, Dustin Brown, Jeff Carter, and Mike Richards. It’s that simple really!!

One could conclude from this exercise that defensemen may in fact be more important to winning a Cup than scoring champion forwards. Almost every team to win the Cup had some legit Dudes on the back-end, but not nearly as many had an Art Ross/Hart Trophy winner. The dynasties generally have both because you need to be great at so many things to win multiple times, but you can’t find a dynasty with an elite scorer leading it that didn’t have some stud defensemen behind them.

Montreal’s big three of the late 70s

Yeah the Blackhawks of the 2010s had Patrick Kane, but they also had prime Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook, and Niklas Hjalmarsson on the team. The Avs last year had MacKinnon, but they also had Cale Makar and Devon Toews soaking up minutes. How about Yzerman’s old Lightning squad, with Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos? Well they may well have had the best defensive group I’ve seen in the last 10+ years when they won the Cup in 2020, with Victor Hedman, Ryan McDonagh, Erik Černák, Mikhail Sergachev, and Kevin Shattenkirk dominating on the back end.

Perhaps no team is a better example of this than the late 70s Canadiens, the greatest teams of all time. Ask most fans who they think of first from that era of Habs squads and they’ll say Guy Lafleur, your flashy skilled forward. But most who have watched those teams (your author included) would say the real heart and soul of the squad was the Big Three of Larry Robinson, Serge Savard, and Guy Lapointe on defense.³ Bringing it back to Hockeytown, it’s probably no surprise that the Red Wings went from a serious contender for the Cup to merely a decent playoff team once Nick Lidstrom retired and Brian Rafalski’s back gave out.

Even if you go down a notch, I would argue that it’s much more common to see a team of great scorers go nowhere due to poor defensemen on the roster than the other way around. And it’s not like these two positions exist independently of each other. A team with great defensemen reaps a lot of offensive benefit from those defensemen, because those great defenders are able to win retrievals in the defensive zone, create controlled zone exits, transition the puck up ice, and drive offensive play from the back-end forward. Last year’s Avalanche team was one of the great examples of this.

So all of this is a way of saying that if Steve Yzerman is able to hit on all of his picks within a reasonable definition of the phrase, but no Hart Trophy level forward appears, it’s not necessarily game over. I can see the seeds of a defensive monster a la Carolina building here. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t continue looking for skilled forwards who can put the puck in the net as they build. That was a major weakness of the team they trotted out there this past season, after all, and is something to address.

I am certainly interested in acquiring a great shooter like an Alex DeBrincat if a package of picks or older roster players can make it happen (not interested in dealing core prospects for him). Goal-scoring wingers do hit the open market much more than centers, with the DeBrincat sweepstakes being an example of that. Complementing the strong two-way centers in the system with NHL goal-scoring forwards is the best way to build this team, so when those players pop up at a reasonable cost, make it happen. Some play-driving, transitional forwards wouldn’t hurt either if they appeared on the open market.

Is all of this a way of rationalizing my disappointment at the team not taking a swing on a Zach Benson or a Gabriel Perreault? Probably yes, but I’m also giving you honest analysis of what I think. I think Yzerman’s way of building the team, strong on D and at C, is a fine way of building a team… I just wish there was one F in the system who I felt was going to totally kick ass in the future and score 55 goals because those players are a lot of fun. But as we’ve seen, you don’t necessarily have to have one.

That said, it’s also not like the Red Wings couldn’t acquire one at a later date. Some NHL analysts are fixated on the idea that you have to draft the entirety of your core, but hockey trades and free agency exist. To that point, we’ve seen some damn good players shake loose recently, Jack Eichel and Matthew Tkachuk in just the last 18 months. Johnny Gaudreau hit UFA last summer as well as an example. If, for the sake of argument, the Red Wings did have some dominant defensive club in the future with great blue liners and two-way Fs but lacked the big star to put them over the top, they could always trade a star defenseman for a star forward.

You never know what the future holds and acquiring good players/building a team stocked with them is the best way to go about things and to get back in the playoffs. Build a good playoff team with the best players available to you and figure the rest of the “fit” out later. And hey, given their penchant for collecting “premium positions”, it could make for some powerful trade chips in the future.

[NHL.com]

Should we be IMPATIENT with the YZERPLAN?

So now we circle around to our biggest question: should we be angry at Yzerman that the rebuild isn’t moving fast enough? Is it time to lose hope? Quite a few people on the internet are mad, but the nature of the Yzerman conversations around the corners of the internet at the moment are quite humorous. On one hand there are casual Red Wings fans mad that Yzerman said he’s still rebuilding and not pushing for the playoffs, while Hockey Twitter Take-havers are on the other hand upset that Yzerman isn’t doing enough rebuilding. So what the hell is going on here, and what gives?

The grumbling from the most uninformed members of the fanbase on draft night was definitely something to behold, all because Yzerman admitted that he knows where his team is in its life cycle and is honest about it. This, I should add, is something that most fanbases wish they had. Look, I get that this long playoff drought is frustrating, but you can blame Ken Holland for that. He made Yzerman start from scratch multiple years after the team had already burned down.

The slow rebuild under Yzerman is partially the result of Holland, partially the result of a ridiculously stacked Atlantic Division causing Yzerman to be more careful and less aggressive, but also Yzerman’s philosophies. In going with a defenseman-centric rebuild, Yzerman simultaneously opted for a slower rebuild. Defensemen take longer to develop, especially these big, project-type defensemen that Yzerman prefers to draft. I tend to believe that every defenseman should take two years to marinate after being drafted before debuting in the NHL. And even after that point, I’m a believer that you don’t begin to know what you have in a D until the ~300 games played mark. That’s four season’s worth, so we’re talking six years after being drafted. Yeah! It’s a long time!

Yzerman also believes in letting prospects take their time and not rushing it. That’s another reason he’s a good GM, not a bad one. He builds his teams with the goal of making prospects bust down the door to earn a spot, as Raymond and Seider did in the fall of 2021. But in the process, that means less of his prospects are on the team. Right now for 2023-24, the Red Wings are looking at a roster that would have only a few Yzerman picks on it out of 18 spots, depending on who breaks the team from camp. The way I evaluate the patience angle is where the prospects Yzerman drafted are in their development cycle. If they are falling behind or looking like busts, then you get riled up. If they are still on track, then you just have to be patient.

Right now, it looks much more like the latter. Out of all the players they have drafted in the first round under Yzerman entering this year’s draft, only (maybe) Cossa can be argued as being “behind” on his development, and that was largely when he was struggling at the WJC and in the ECHL. I’d say by the end of the season he was angling back on course. Seider has outperformed his draft slot, Raymond is about where I’d expect, Edvinsson is a bit ahead of my expectations at this stage and the same for Kasper. We shall see if Danielson and Sandin-Pelikka follow suit. Additionally, for the mid-round guys, we should start to get a litmus test soon on players like Johansson, Wallinder, and Mazur but for now, they seem promising.

Within a year or two, the NHL roster should be much more infused with pipeline talent and it’s on Yzerman to build a team that can be competitive while slotting those players in. This is where we have to address the other side of the coin, the takes flying around the internet from reasonably smart people like Dmitri Filipovic and Ryan Lambert of EPRinkside, to hockey analytics social media influencer JFreshHockey. The take goes something like this: the team should either go ham and trade prospects for win now players a la Rangers/Kings to make the playoffs immediately or try to be as bad as possible to get more top five picks and the fact they are doing neither is a sign that they have no plan.

Generally, those with that take believe in the other half of the “or” there, that the team should continue to be horrendous until they magically become really good. And more specifically, that the Red Wings should refrain from signing UFAs, which leads us to the recent free agent period. Once again the Red Wings were active in free agency, just like last summer, and their habits this time around were condemned by the screeds of the hockey blogger class. Example:

What I don't really understand are the long-term commitments to some of the others up at the top, especially when combining the context of where they're at as an organization and what those players provide. When he took a sharp step back and sold off everything he could at last year's trade deadline, general manager Steve Yzerman was fairly critical of the Red Wings, and how far away they were from competing against some of the other teams in their own division. 

That was the right assessment at the time, and it was encouraging to hear because it provided some hope for their plan of action moving forward. But the choices they just made yet again this summer don't really gel with that, and the fact that it's unclear what their goals are and what they're trying to ultimately accomplish is kind of concerning.

The “up at the top” at the beginning is referencing contracts given to Andrew Copp, JT Compher, and Ben Chiarot, who were at the top of a list Filipovic put together of the signings. What’s been confusing reading these takes is how the bloggers in question here seem to see a fundamental disagreement between the signings the Red Wings are making and the actions of a rebuilding team, and that making these signings is in some way damaging their future. For this we go to Lambert:

They have a good farm system, for sure, but how many of those guys are particularly close to coming into the NHL, and how many of them are now effectively blocked from doing so in the next few years because of some of the commitments Steve Yzerman has made in pursuit of maybe getting to 90 points next season? 

And then he throws out the team akin to cancer in “how to rebuild” circles:

If this is the Yzerplan in action, hopefully there's an Yzerbackupplan they can enact ASAP, because years of signing veterans and only getting to "mediocrity" is how you become the Vancouver Canucks.

So, what do we make of this? Are the signings Yzerman has made over the past two offseasons jeopardizing the project? For those unfamiliar, here is the list, directly from that Filipovic article:

• Andrew Copp - 5 years, $28.125 million

• J.T. Compher - 5 years, $25.5 million

• Ben Chiarot - 4 years, $19 million

• Justin Holl - 3 years, $10.2 million

• David Perron - 2 years, $9.5 million

• Dominik Kubalík - 2 years, $5 million

• Shayne Gostisbehere - 1 year, $4.125 million

• Daniel Sprong - 1 year, $2 million

Of all of these players, the only player I aggressively dislike is Ben Chiarot, and that may be an understatement on my feelings about him. But everyone else I am somewhere between lukewarm and very warm on. What confuses me about the reaction from the blogger class is the inability to diagnose a plan, when to me the plan seems quite obvious: field a decent team that sells tickets and doesn’t get run off the ice every night, until top prospects slide onto the roster and take it to a higher gear.

I understand where some of the blind spot is. Most NHL teams’ rebuilding cycle is one where they are extremely bad and then they get good with a nucleus of young players (typically star forwards), often clearly and directionally. The Red Wings’ seeming approach of “build a roster of NPCs to get 85 points until more and more kids join the roster” is a more unusual one, but that doesn’t make it inherently doomed to fail. As I’ve said many times, it’s hard to go from 60 points to 100 points in the NHL in one season. It happens every so often, surprisingly twice in this past season with New Jersey and Seattle, but it is not common. Typically there are steps of progression upwards.

[Lindy Wasson/AP]

The Red Wings of 2020-22 were dreadful to watch. The 2020 team was one of the worst NHL teams of the past 10 years and 2022’s pace of frequently giving up 7+ goals could not continue. I do believe in winning and losing cultures and the bad vibes with Jeff Blashill and years and years of losing with no end in sight needed to be changed. Bringing in some veteran players on reasonable contracts to improve the team, change some of the culture, and provide support for the younger pieces as they join the roster is a very reasonable strategy to me.

Does that mean that the Red Wings’ chance of getting a top five pick goes down? Sure. That may be your best argument, that the team should just keep being horrible until finally, one year, they win the goddang lottery. But I don’t love this strategy, either, because there’s no guarantee that the year you win it is going to payoff with an elite prospect at the top. The 2020 draft, the one that saw the Wings fall from the best odds of winning the lottery to the fourth pick, had Alexis Lafreniere waiting at 1st overall. At the time we were devastated about losing out on a franchise forward. Three years later Lafreniere has not had a single season with >40 points or >20 goals. Maybe it still happens, but it’s getting late early for him.⁴

It’s the Magic Johnson School of Stating the Obvious to say it, but the best way to rebuild your hockey team is by picking good hockey players in the NHL Draft. That can be at 1st overall, 10th overall, or 20th overall. The probability of getting a superstar decreases the later you pick (especially at F), but there are often gems to be found everywhere. It is true in any league that you want to pick higher, but as I’ve said about the Detroit Pistons, the problem of the Pistons from 2010-2019 isn’t necessarily that they never picked top five in the NBA Draft, it’s that whoever they picked was almost always the wrong choice. Typically one or two slots before some other team picked a future All-Star.

Moreover, how many more top five or ten picks do the Red Wings need? If the aforementioned core, Seider/Raymond/Edvinsson/Kasper/Danielson/Cossa/ASP, is not good enough to at least provide the framework for a contending team, with trades/signings filling in around and accenting it, then the Yzerplan is already fucked. And in the words of former Indianapolis Colts offensive coordinator Tom Moore, we don’t practice fucked. I’ve already presented loads of evidence why a team built around defensemen and two-way centers can absolutely win Stanley Cups… the fate of the Yzerplan rests on whether or not some years down the line the core pieces they’ve drafted are Those Dudes or not. Maybe you are a Prospect Knower who is dead sure what the Red Wings have assembled won’t be good enough, but I prefer to let it happen and see how the players perform in the NHL. As I pointed out, none of them are close to bust status, so I don’t think anyone should be hitting the panic button.

Pulling it back to the point at hand, my broad reaction to all this chatter about the “Yzerplan” and recent UFA signings is “who gives a damn”? Signing Justin Holl to 3x$3.4 will in no way effect whether that core of players, the majority of whom are not yet in the NHL, is good or not. Nor will David Perron 2x$4.75, or any other signing listed there. Lambert’s willingness to toss out the Vancouver Canucks, a team who did legitimately jeopardize their future under Jim Benning by signing useless veterans who crippled the team’s long-term cap space, is completely asinine. First of all, none of these contracts besides the Chiarot one even begin to approach “Tyler Myers 6x$6” or “Loui Eriksson 6x$6 M” or “Jay Beagle 4x$3” or “Antoine Roussell 4x$3” or “trading for Oliver Ekman-Larsson at “6x$8.3”.

[NHL.com]

Yzerman is not handing out contracts with term resembling those, the players he’s giving them to aren’t as old as many of those guys were, and the cap numbers are largely lower. The only players who have gotten any real term are Chiarot (4 years), Copp (5 years), and Compher (5 years). Again, Chiarot is an L, I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But Copp and Compher were both 28 when given those deals. They will be fine. Every other player has been 1-3 year contracts.

Second of all, who really believes that Detroit’s cap structure is getting crippled by any of these signings? Even after all these moves, the Red Wings are still $9 M+ below the salary cap, fifth-most cap space in the NHL per Puckpedia. For next offseason, the team has $35 M+ in cap space and nearly $60 M in space for 2025-26. The books are still clean for the long term, something anyone can tell by quickly taking a gander at capfriendly.com, which apparently was too much to ask of the Yzerplan take-havers. You can have doubts and criticisms of the Yzerplan, but let’s not get in the habit of making things up.

Thirdly, revisiting the Lambert question “how many (prospects) are now effectively blocked from (joining the Red Wings) in the next few years because of some of the commitments Steve Yzerman has made”… does anyone reading this really believe that if Simon Edvinsson is ready to play in the NHL, the Red Wings won’t move players around to make that happen? Or if Marco Kasper is ready to play center, the team won’t, say, shift Andrew Copp to the wing to clear a spot on the depth chart? I don’t believe that for one minute, considering how enthusiastically they’ve made space for Seider and Raymond in the past.

The players Detroit is signing also aren’t good enough to “block” prospects. I’ve made this complaint about the Kings acquiring big time players like Victor Arvidsson, Phil Danault, and Pierre-Luc Dubois, legitimately blocking their top prospects from playing. None of these players the Red Wings have signed are as good as any of those players and none have been given the sort of contract commitments that lead to blockage. If Olli Määttä is blocking Simon Edvinsson, I feel comfortable saying the Red Wings will bench him or move him, or whatever, because he’s on a $2 M cap hit.

All in all, the recent outcry about the Yzerplan is strange unless your fundamental belief about rebuilds is that you should be horrendous until you win the lottery and draft Connor Bedard. I don’t think that belief is a very good one or grounded in sound logic, but you are allowed to have it. Throwing a fit about JT Compher 5x$5.1 on a team with more cap space than almost anyone is completely crazy. The Yzerplan will not be won or lost on any of this. If and when any of the top prospects are bad in the NHL, then it will be time to have some serious conversations.

For this upcoming season, I expect the Red Wings to further progress. Continued improvement, perhaps up to 85 or 90 points should be a reasonable goal. It won’t be enough for the playoffs most likely, and it will probably see Shayne Gostisbehere, David Perron, and maybe Dominik Kubalik traded at the deadline, but success will hinge on the young players. I hope to see Simon Edvinsson get a real crack at the NHL during this season, be it out of camp or later, and any shots that Kasper, Soderblom, or Mazur get at the team will be important to watch. The further progression of Seider and Raymond are hugely important storylines to follow as well. Get a pick around 10-12, finally take a big swing on a high upside winger, and then see if a springboard to the postseason in 2024-25 is possible.

Yes, that outline above is calling for more patience and I know that being patient sucks. Having a quick rebuild, a la the mid-2010s Maple Leafs, is a lot of fun. Bottom out for a couple years and suck, grab three elite F studs, and then jump right back into the playoffs. But A) few forward prospects in recent years have been as good as immediately as Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews were and B) it’s not like the Leafs have won anything of note to this point out of that!

Don’t draft only for need, don’t rush your prospects, and don’t accelerate out of a rebuild too soon. As I addressed earlier, I don’t believe the Red Wings are doing that. They’re not signing long-term contracts and aren’t trading away high picks for win-now players. They’re merely filling out a roster to meet the cap floor on a team of players who won’t get blown out every night. It’s frustrating to put a losing product out there for that many years but I’d rather be bad for a long time to then be good for a long time than be bad for a short time to be aggressively mediocre for a long time.

[NHL.com]

Concluding

Despite my fiery rebuttals of those critcizing the Yzerplan, I am not saying that Yzerman is definitely going to turn the Red Wings into a juggernaut. Nobody can say that either way, and that’s my point. It’s too early. Until Yzerman’s draft picks are on the roster and have been given time to acclimate to the NHL, we are blathering about largely irrelevant debates.

As an NHL watcher, I believe Yzerman does have a plan and does have a vision for this team, one I have identified in this piece. It doesn’t necessarily jibe 100% with the Internet Scouts and the Hockey Bloggers, nor my own, but it doesn’t have to. It just has to work. Yzerman seems to have compiled a promising collection of U23 players on the roster and in the pipeline, perhaps lacking in high end offensive upside but as we have seen A) that may not be a death knell for the type of project he’s building and B) it could be rectified later.

For now, things are still trending towards brighter days ahead with a strong prospect pool of players at premium positions, a clean long-term NHL salary structure, and plenty of assets to play with. Over the next few years, we’ll see more of the prospects slot into NHL the roster and presumably much more aggressive pro personnel moves to accelerate things. Not quite now, but in the near future. The vision is there, a true slow-and-steady wins the race sort of thing, built around the positions that take the longest to develop and would have the best trade value down the line. It might work, it might not, but it’s too early to declare either way. And getting worked up about signing JT Compher is definitely a waste of time.

1. I know some people are going to act like Eichel is some incredible scorer because of his name brand, but he has a career high of 82 points. Even on this season’s Vegas team, Eichel was a point-per-game player, not someone jockeying with McDavid for the Art Ross

2. It was definitely Eliáš. He stayed the longest and even when the A-Line was humming at NJ’s offensive peak, Eliáš was the highest scorer, and that’s before you factor in the defense

3. It wasn’t just the Big Three either. Those 70s Habs were incredible at preventing goals. Lemaire as your 1C says a lot, but of course there was Dryden in net too and that’s before you get into a line of Doug Jarvis and Bob Gainey killing penalties

4. Lucas Raymond’s NHL achievements have been superior to Lafreniere’s at this point in time. Some of that is role, but I think most folks would pick Raymond over Lafreniere if they had a choice of who to start a team with right now