Sure, I could’ve mentioned his 5 goals, I could also mention he has 2 game winners all year. The thing is when he does score, that’s it, it’s like he’s satisfied and done for the night. Most of his scoring is when the goal really has no bearing on the outcome of a game. How many 2 goal games has he had in his career? How many hat tricks? After 8 years he still disappears. Time to cut the cord.
One of the goals btw was the completely fictional goal that made it a 6-2 loss very late in a game on an obvious goalie interference. The goal was hilarious. Everybody had quit thinking the play was whistled down and theres Nuge *scoring* on his third hack. Think about the context. It was 6-1 with two minutes left. A player that had been doing nothing was trying desperately to get that one knowing he'd done nothing. It was his one single point in a 6 game stretch.
Some of his others through this span were nice tap ins off gold feeds. But more the case some of the time its going to go in. Nuge gets a ton of feeds playing on first unit PP, certainly no shortage of them, and like I said earlier he had 7 primo scoring chances last night, cashed none, and only had 4 on net. I think he took 9 shots in the game.
This feeds into the latter point that its often Nuge doing the shooting on the PP. lmao. We have McD. a 40 goal scorer in his sleep, and Drai, a 42 goal scorer this season on the same damn PP and Nuge is taking more shots on goal than anybody. He has 200 shots this season, as many as Drasaitl, who has happened to scrore twice as many goals. But Nuge is playing with these best in the NHL talents, 2 of em, on one PP, and Nuge is on that unit every game and has 1 assist in the last 15GP. Its absolutely bizarre. This gives indication of how much Nuge is helping anybody on the PP, or helping the PP at all.
But the biggest point that can be made that in the 15GP since Feb 13, one month ago, and in the stretch run Nuge somehow has only 6pts in 15GP despite being near PPG nearly all the season before that.
He's -5 during that stretch. So that the 3rd best forward on the team has basically gone into a funk, again, at the most important segment in a season. But this same player will play like a demon in a decided game in the last minutes bagging that one more point or goal to pad a stat line to make it look like he makes any type of salient contribution.