Again, he outproduced DD every time he was used at number one... and then they'd send him down. He finally gets the gig AFTER we're out of the playoffs and becomes a top ten NHL scorer the rest of the way. The following season he's a point per game before injury. And after that of course we didn't give him his job back and he ran into more injury problems.
It was f***ing stupid how we handled him and then injuries finished him off. Nobody is going to say he was without warts but he was offensively gifted on a team - STARVING FOR GOALS - and we still played a midget there who was worse.
Almost every player who's ever played has spoken about confidence. Again, if you don't know it by now I won't be able to convince you. Caufield didn't have a pissy attitude and yet he was still held back. Still only scored one goal on the year.... the instant a new guy comes in he scores at a 50 goal pace.
How the hell can you say it doesn't matter????? I will never understand this.
It makes absolutely no sense to bury guys with talent on the 4th line. If you're going to do that then send them down. And that's what I think we should do with Slaf.
Caufield turned it around quick, after the coaching change. AG never did, no matter where he played or who he played under or who he played with. There’s a lot more to it than to just blame it on him not being gifted the 1C spot in MTL. Every coach had the same view of AG, it wasn’t just MT.
AG was slow, turnover prone, did not play defense, didn’t hustle, didn’t play physical, and was lazy and refused to work on his weak areas. Even when it came to just garbage time point production, he was streaky.
Tell me how a coach is supposed to play a young player with those attributes over veterans and guys that are working their asses off to be there. Just slot him right into the top line huh? It doesn’t happen, and it wouldn’t have happened anywhere else. People just like to bitch about it because it was MT.
DD was on the top line because he worked harder than AG (not hard to do), and our best offensive player had chemistry with him and wanted to play with him. I hated DD too, but there really wasn’t any other viable option.